Casino Paradise exemplifies William Bolcom's stylistic idiom, which is firmly grounded in American jazz and popular song. In form it is a musical, though it clearly was not intended as a Broadway-style show. It is a drama with musical numbers, which are all in popular and rock idioms, though informed by Classical structures and techniques. A similarly "fused" work for comparison might be Kurt Weill's Aufstieg und Fall des Stadt Mahagony—although the Weill work is a through-composed opera. The orchestration is for a modern small theater orchestra (without strings) with solo winds, piano, percussion, and synthesizer keyboards. Composition and production were supported by grants from the Ford Foundation and the William Penn Foundation.

Like Mahagony, Casino Paradise tells the story of an American oceanside town that is made into an anything-goes paradise. When Casino Paradise was being planned, the phenomenon of legalized gambling in the United States was at the beginning of its breakout from the state of Nevada; the old resort town of Atlantic City, NJ, was one of the first places to build fancy new casino-hotels. (Not without some irony, the riverboat gambling and Indian casino boom of the 1990s resulted in an actual place called Casino Paradise and several other gambling resorts with variants of that name.)

The protagonist of the play, Ferguson (a real estate mogul), convinces the residents of a sleepy seaside town to support his planned Casino Paradise. Those he can't convince with his vision of easy money he bribes or blackmails out of opposition. Ultimately, he recognizes the soul-destroying nature of his business and destroys it in order to save his son from becoming like him.

The book was written by Arnold Weinstein and Thomas Babe, and the lyrics were by Weinstein. Bolcom and Weinstein are longtime collaborators, having first worked together in Dynamite Tonight (1960), a cabaret opera. Since then, they have written several theater pieces, including the full-scale opera McTeague.

Casino Paradise was the first work commissioned by the American Music Theater Festival. It was directed by David Alden and opened at the Plays & Players Theater in Philadelphia, in 1990. The music from it was recorded using the original cast immediately after the end of its run. Principal singers were Timothy Nolen as Ferguson; Eddie Korbich as his son Stanley; Janet Metz as his daughter Cis; and Walter Hudson as McCoy. The recording was released on the Koch label.

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