Derek Hough is bringing his holiday dance production back to the Las Vegas Strip for one night only, with Derek Hough Dance for the Holidays set to take the stage at BleauLive Theater inside Fontainebleau Las Vegas on December 29 at 7:30 p.m. The show features Hough and a cast of dancers performing holiday songs, blending choreography and stage production into a festive one-off during the Strip's busiest travel week of the year.
According to FOX5 Vegas, general on-sale for tickets begins August 21 at 10 a.m. PDT through Fontainebleau's own website, with presales running throughout the week beforehand. Hough, a four-time Emmy winner, is no stranger to the Strip: he previously headlined the solo residency Derek Hough: No Limit at the 750-seat Summit Showroom inside The Venetian Resort Las Vegas during 2021 and 2022, a run that blended ballroom, tap, salsa, and hip-hop across 30 dates, according to Las Vegas Weekly.
Hough's broader television résumé looms large over the booking. He holds the Primetime Emmy record for the most nominations for Outstanding Choreography in Television Academy history, with 13 nods, and is tied for the most wins in the category with four statues earned in 2013, 2015, 2021, and 2023, per ABC Press. He also remains the only professional dancer in Dancing with the Stars history to win six Mirrorball Trophies, having claimed titles with celebrity partners including Brooke Burke, Nicole Scherzinger, and Bindi Irwin before joining the show's judging panel in 2020.
NappyTabs Bring UNLV Roots and Cirque Credits to the Production
The tour is co-created and directed by Napoleon and Tabitha Dumo, the Emmy-winning duo known as NappyTabs, who supervise choreography for the show. The pair, who have won two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Choreography, first met in the early 1990s as dance students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, according to the Television Academy.
Their Las Vegas Strip résumé is deep: the duo previously provided creative direction and choreography for Jennifer Lopez's All I Have residency at Planet Hollywood and Cirque du Soleil's Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour, and they also co-directed hip-hop crew Jabbawockeez's MÜS.I.C. stage show, the Television Academy notes. That combination of TV pedigree and large-scale resort production experience is central to how this one-night engagement is being pitched to Strip audiences.
A Producer With Broadway and Vegas Residency Credits
Lead producer Greg Young, working under the banner Mojave Ghost, produces the tour and brings his own theatrical track record to the project. Young, a Tony and Drama Desk Award-nominated producer, has previously produced Broadway's 2023 revival of Bob Fosse's Dancin', Donny Osmond's long-running Las Vegas residency at Harrah's, The Illusionists, Little Women, Hough's earlier No Limit residency, and Hough's Symphony of Dance live tour, according to FOX5 Vegas.
The show's timing is no accident. A December 29 date lands squarely in Las Vegas's peak year-end holiday tourism window between Christmas and New Year's Eve, when Strip resorts routinely see near-capacity hotel occupancy and heightened demand for entertainment, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Resort operators have leaned heavily on special holiday programming to capture that year-end foot traffic, and BleauLive Theater's booking strategy reflects it directly.
Why BleauLive Books Single Nights Instead of Residencies
BleauLive Theater is a 90,000-square-foot, three-level venue with a 3,800-guest capacity, and it was designed intentionally for short-run touring acts and limited weekend engagements rather than the traditional extended multi-week residencies that define much of Strip entertainment. That model has already brought other holiday-timed bookings to the venue this year, including Creed's Creedmas shows and a Ricky Martin Halloween engagement, both reported previously by Hoodline.
The theater sits inside the $3.7 billion, 67-story Fontainebleau Las Vegas, which officially opened in December 2023 after nearly 16 years of construction stalls and ownership shifts, making it Nevada's tallest hotel building, per Travel Weekly. Original developer Jeffrey Soffer reacquired the property in 2021 after it went bankrupt during the 2008 Great Recession, a saga that makes the resort's current run of high-profile bookings notable in its own right.
Hough's touring ensemble has also weathered a serious personal ordeal in recent years. His wife and lead touring dance partner, Hayley Erbert, suffered a life-threatening cranial hematoma during their Symphony of Dance tour in December 2023 that required an emergency craniectomy, and she underwent a second skull-replacement surgery later that month before making a recovery and returning to perform with Hough on Dancing with the Stars in October 2024, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Hough recently brought a version of his live show to Texas, and Hoodline covered his stop with Symphony of Dance encore in San Antonio. For Las Vegas audiences, the December 29 date offers just one shot to catch the show, with tickets available through Fontainebleau's website starting August 21 at 10 a.m. PDT.
