MACAU: Cigarette smoke drifts upward as chain-smoking gamblers at the Casino Lisboa yell excitedly in Cantonese. Staff scurry back and forth with trays of milk tea while prostitutes circle an outer lobby in search of customers.

It is a no-frills operation at the Lisboa, one of Macau’s best-known casinos, and the tired decor seems to have changed little since it was showcased in the 1974 James Bond film ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’.

For decades, this was Macau’s gaming scene — monopolised by 88-year-old tycoon Stanley Ho — until it opened to foreign competition in 2002.

A stream of Las Vegas-based gaming companies flooded into the former Portuguese colony, hoping to cash in on what promised to be a massive market of gambling-mad visitors from nearby Hong Kong and mainland China.

The newcomers built ostentatious casino hotels with thousands of rooms, dwarfing Macau’s older venues. Money poured into the once sleepy city of half a million people and now gambling revenues have overtaken those in Las Vegas.

But the plan to transform Macau from Asia’s seedy

gambling den into a Vegas-style family entertainment hub

has not matched its

gaming success.

“It is the early stages of the whole entertainment offering in Macau,” Davis Fong, director of the University of Macau’s Institute for the Study of Commercial Gaming, said. “It’s going to take some time for tourists and locals to accept it.”

Lingering doubts about the idea re-ignited last month when Las Vegas Sands chairman Sheldon Adelson complained that ticket sales for the Cirque de Soleil show ZAIA at his Venetian hotel were “disappointing.”

Adelson said Cirque de Soleil promised to “improve the show or replace it.” The world-renowned act, which usually plays to capacity crowds,

was the linchpin in Macau’s plan to become an entertainment and gaming hub.

The Montreal-based company disputes the accuracy of Adelson’s comments, but said drawing a local Chinese audience to the show — a mixture of dance and acrobatics set to music — has been a challenge. “ZAIA is the first and the only show of its kind in this

unique market,” spokeswoman Renee-Claude Menard said. “There is no entertainment ‘tradition’ in Macau which makes the challenge even greater. It therefore requires very distinctive marketing approaches to ensure its success.”

She said Cirque is making adjustments to the show, but “there has never been a question of replacing ZAIA.”

Apart from attracting some local talent, Macau’s sparse entertainment offerings include a few burlesque shows and a tacky harbourfront theme park. A plan to build a version of the Playboy Mansion in Macau has reportedly been shelved while most casino operators remain conservative in their plans for new entertainment venues.

One hurdle is that Macau’s 23-million annual visitors stay an average of 1.5 days, less than the average three to four night stay in Las Vegas.