They Got It
Kyle Petersen and Kristine Petrucione: Vegas’ Source of Onstage Fun, but Who Are They When the Lights Go Down?
By Eric Duran-Valle | Photos by Victoria Koelkebeck
Kyle Petersen smoking a prop cigarette with Kristine Petrucione atop their bestselling faux hay bale behind Western Stage Props.
In the muggy Cosmopolitan parking garage, I fished a gray blazer out of the backseat of my car. Smoothing out the wrinkles in the jacket, I tried to make myself look decent. This costume of a lowercase “cosmopolitan” was my effort to fit in at Superfrico, a half-circus-half-restaurant operated by entertainment company Spiegelworld. The gag in this place is that every fifteen minutes or so, a sideshow will come out and perform for diners, such as a dancing astronaut or cow stripper.
As I awaited my pizza, a man in full Western attire burst in, riding a very small bicycle and honking the horn as he weaves through the dining room. Typically, Kyle Petersen will switch between the hula-hooping Scott on the Rocks or the “Fuckin-A-Chef” who shows his audience how to spin plates. But tonight he was specifically requested by management to be his proper Western clown, Cowboy Kyle, for a VIP.
After a brief break, Kyle returns with his lasso. This is his real time to shine. He begins with a few spoke hops, quickly stepping in and out of the low-lying loop; he switches to handshakes, a technique to pass the lasso from one hand to the other so it goes around the whole body; then, the iconic wedding ring, where he jumps all the way inside the loop and spins it around himself.
Then he says, “I’m gonna try something I haven’t done before,” and then seamlessly hops through and brings the rope around multiple times, drawing audible ‘wows' from the audience. Out of breath, he takes a bow and exits.
* * *
Earlier that same day, Kristine Petrucione gently scratches her husband Kyle’s ginger beard as they sit across from me on a red velvet couch. Kyle, dressed in a fuzzy polo shirt, and Kristine, donning a black sweater with embossed golden feathers, chat with me as if we’re seated in their living room. But instead of being surrounded by the domestic trappings of floor lamps and curtains from IKEA, this room is fixed with professional-grade overhead lights, a white cyclorama and a selection of elaborate backdrops that would be right at home in a Hollywood soundstage.
The studio, along with the prop-adorned showroom next door, show how Kyle and Kristine have grown Western Stage Props from a one-room prop shop into a diversified business. As the name would suggest, Western Stage Props (WSP) is where you can find everything you’d need to make a Will Rogers-worthy production, from blank-firing revolvers to a genuine Dick Cory poly rope with a swivel honda (in layman’s terms, a lasso). Refusing to be typecast, however, WSP’s catalog offers much more than just Western-themed goods. Need fake blood? They got it. A clawfoot bathtub? They got it. A crate of tomatoes and a chainsaw? $20 for each.
A commercial paying homage to a beloved local swap meet ad? Yep, they got it.
What kind of folks run this sort of place? Just as the WSP studio can transform into a vintage tiki bar or film noir crime scene, so do Kyle and Kristine morph into colorful on-stage personas. Characters that led them all the way from one end of the country to the other.
I spy Lolita Haze @TheVintageStarlet as pin-up Jason Voorhees, faux blood, a jackalope and bald eagle from Western Stage Props.
* * *
On a cold night in New York City many years ago, Kristine stepped off the train in the Bronx and found herself in the pouring rain. Walking alone, she headed over to a Dominican night club for a gig that was paying a measly $50.
“When I was eight,” Kristine says, “[my parents] took me to see Swan Lake. And then I just fell in love and wanted to be a ballerina ever since.” Beginning with mastery of the ballet barre, the South Florida native developed an aptitude for multiple styles of dance. At 19, she moved to Los Angeles. But after years of placid back-up dancer gigs in the California sun, she decided that life needed to be a bit more challenging.
So, there she was in cold New York, working as a kind-of ring girl/magician’s assistant for a large man whom we’ll call, “Paul the Human Rug.” Paul the Human Rug’s schtick was extreme pain tolerance, like walking through shattered glass and having multiple people (usually women) stand on him as he lay down on the floor. “It was bizarre,” Kristine recalls. “I had to take [an] apple and throw it on a bed of nails.”
Besides Paul the Human Rug, the talent that evening included a mini Michael Jackson impersonator, a contortionist (who was also the event promoter), and a cocky kid on a unicycle named Kyle.
He was running off a high from being in a then-recent episode of The Colbert Report, featuring a segment about his fight with the city of New York over his right to ride a unicycle on the sidewalk. He boasted this to a fairly unimpressed Kristine, but they still ended up heading down to the subway station together anyway.
They rode the train at five in the morning, eventually parting ways but destined to reunite.
* * *
Kyle got up a couple times during our interview to answer phone calls and attend to business matters. Western Stage Props is still a functional storefront after all, along with the robust online shop. But before Kyle and Kristine took over, WSP’s physical location might best be described as a glorified warehouse.
“I had worked at Dubé Juggling, which was a juggling store [in Soho],” Kyle tells me. He got the gig by imposing himself as a juggling expert to customers, even though he wasn’t an actual employee. Until he was.
“[Brian] Dubé didn't ever want to hire a juggler, because he thought that jugglers would steal his shit, you know? Which… in a way I did.”
Dubé sourced his trick ropes from Western Stage Props, which is how Kyle learned about the company. It may have just remained a far-away place on a business invoice, if not for the fact that Kristine had grown tired of New York and Kyle wasn’t finding much gig work in the Big Apple.
During a visit to Las Vegas before permanently settling, Kyle was determined to see WSP in person. With Kristine alongside, he eagerly walked in the shop.
“It was very underwhelming,” Kyle says.
“It was very underwhelming,” Kristine echoes.
They found a bland office with three trick ropes on the wall. Still a good sport, Kyle bought a rope and left behind his resume. Later, the duo relocated to Vegas, got hitched at the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather Wedding Chapel (requiescat in pace), and found steady work at Western Stage Props. Eventually, they bought out the business, expanding its offerings.
Their clientele include what you might expect: performers, filmmakers, etc… but they also have found a market among emergency response agencies, who make use of their props for training exercises. Kyle and Kristine’s strong connection to Vegas’s clowning, burlesque and other live entertainment communities makes them a go-to destination for production assets.
Kristine, who has a personal fondness for the music video era, produces an MTV-inspired burlesque called, “Living on Video.” With Kyle acting as VJ (Video Jockey), each performer themes their set around an iconic track from the 1980s (or at least something close to the decade). One segment, set to “Living in Stereo” by The Cars, features Kyle seated and wearing a pair of headphones as Kristine and another dancer perform a synchronized dance, a clever interpretation of stereophonic sound.
Towards the end of our conversation, Kyle gets up from the red couch and grabs his mini clown bike. It’s time to get to work.
* * *
After his stunning performance at Superfrico, Kyle sits with me at the bar. He admits his own disbelief at pulling off his new lasso trick, especially in such a tight space. It was so overwhelming that, once he got backstage, he began to cry.
This is the life of an entertainer. Moments of great risk, incredible ecstasy, and profound emotion. It embodies the relationship and life Kristine and Kyle have built together. Picking up stakes and moving coast to coast, breathing a life and showmanship into the prop shop, these are ventures equal parts heartbreak and exhilarating.
Before I left WSP for Superfrico, I stayed a few minutes to keep chatting with Kristine. She reflects, “There's not a lot of places where you can just make a cabaret show or [something] like [Living on Video]… I didn't necessarily always want a theater, but I want a place to do my stuff and [this] seems like the most logical solution.”
While Vegas is catching up in the fine art game, the avant-garde is still trying to find a home. At Western Stage Props, the weird, wacky, and innovative is taking root.
“I guess my bigger goal is to have a place to do what I love,” Kristine says, “and if I have to be the one to create it, then I'll be the one to create it.”
A disclosure: It would feel unbecoming of this author to not admit his own pre-existing connection with Western Stage Props and its owners. Western Stage Props sponsored an event I hosted at Winnie & Ethel’s in 2024 and I am a frequent customer.
Eric Duran-Valle is a writer and musician. His writing has appeared in Lights Off, Desert Companion, TheList.Vegas, In Parentheses, The Colored Lens, and Las Vegas Writes. He is often mistaken for the outlaw musician the Scoundrel of the Sage and formerly played bass in alt pop band Switterbeet. He currently serves as the Board Chair for Vegas Vista Academy, a charter school in Las Vegas, NV.
