Cher starting run in Las Vegas

LOS ANGELES — Cher said farewell, but not goodbye.

Two-and-a-half years after the final show of her three-year “Farewell” concert tour, the Oscar-, Emmy- and Grammy-award winner announced last week that she’d signed on for a three-year, 200-show engagement at Caesars Palace.

Cher said the move was no mere change of heart.

“Well, first of all, there was going to be a big time between ending the show, ending the tour, and going to Vegas,” she said. “I wouldn’t have to move. I wouldn’t have to travel. I could just stay there. Because that’s what I really can’t do anymore, is I can’t go on the road. It’s just too much. It’s just too impossibly hard. And I started there, and I thought that it might be fun.”

“Cher at the Colosseum,” set to debut May 6, will include 18 dancers, aerialists and new costumes designed by Cher’s longtime designer Bob Mackie. Choreography will be directed by Doriana Sanchez, a veteran of the “Believe” and “Farewell” tours. But don’t expect the same old Cher show.

“They have technology that we’ve never seen before,” she said. “It’s like when you went to see ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ for the first time, and you saw the boat and the candelabra and all that. We can do that stuff.”

When it was suggested she’d done little between the end of “Farewell” and now — no concerts, movies or albums — Cher laughed: “Little? How about nothing?”

But now along with the Vegas gigs, the 61-year-old is putting out an all-new studio album, her first since 2001’s “Living Proof.” And she said she’s still considering a longtime offer to do a TV musical of “Mame.”

“You don’t want to stop if you can keep going,” Cher said. “It’s like an artist, it’s like, when was it time for Picasso to stop painting? He had enough paintings, I’m sure, at a certain age. Why didn’t he just stop? I guess because he really liked it, and it was some part of his life. You don’t want to give up some part of your life that’s that important.”