The Rat Pack is back and coming to Thousand Oaks

A bit of awe creeps into Sandy Hackett's voice when he recalls the days when the Rat Pack ruled Las Vegas in all its full-throttle glory.

"The Rat Pack didn't just pack the clubs," he said. "They sold out the whole town. Celebrities, politicians, sports figures, actors, writers, fellow entertainers — some of whom pulled up on stage to be part of it — they all came to see them. They wanted to be part of it. It was a place to be seen.

'SANDY HACKETT'S RAT PACK SHOW'

The tribute show, presented by Theater League, will open Tuesday and run through Oct. 30 at Civic Arts Plaza, 2100 E. Thousand Oaks Blvd., Thousand Oaks. Performances are at 8 p.m. Tuesday through Oct. 28; 2 and 8 p.m. Oct. 29, and 2 and 7 p.m. Oct. 30. Tickets, $44-$59, are available in person at the box office or through Ticketmaster, 800-745-3000, or ticketmaster.com. Discounts are available for military members, students with valid ID and groups of 15 or more. For more information, call 449-2787 or visit civicartsplaza.com. The show's website is sandyhackettsratpackshow.com.

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Contributed photo
Things really start to loosen up in the "Rat Pack Show" when Sandy Hackett (second from right) wheels out the drink cart.

"It was," he continued, "an absolute event."

Some 50 years later, Hackett's "Rat Pack Show," amid a national tour that pulls into Thousand Oaks for eight shows over six days at the Civic Arts Plaza beginning Tuesday, is a loving tribute to Rat Pack members Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Joey Bishop.

In their late 1950s-early 1960s heyday, they, along with fellow Rat Packer Peter Lawford, captured an insouciant sophisticated cool that spawned its own high style and, to some degree, a mythical way of life. It was cigarettes and cocktails, fedoras and suits, all wrapped in song and comedy routines and stage banter under the bright lights of Vegas.

"At their peak," Syracuse University pop culture professor Robert Thompson said, "they were hip guys. When we close our eyes and someone says 1961, we think of Frank and Sammy and Dean. It's a black-and-white image, but it's cool."

It was a different time in America. Or as Hackett put it during a recent interview, "Smoking, drinking and carousing — that's what made you cool."

Hackett, 55, was only a kid then, but he had inside information. His late father was the zany comedian Buddy Hackett, then also a Vegas fixture who knew and hung out with the Rat Pack.

The elder Hackett, who passed away in 2003, helped Sandy write and develop the show; he also "appears" as the Voice of God in the production, which has an extensive family imprint.

Sandy Hackett plays Bishop, whom he affectionately calls "Uncle Joey." His wife, singer-actress Lisa Dawn Miller, plays Frank's One Love. And his stepson, Oliver Richman, plays Young Frank Sinatra. Richman, Hackett said perhaps with a bit of familial pride, "might be the best singer in the cast."

The cast is backed by an eight-piece orchestra that will anchor a rendering of Rat Pack favorites — the Frank character sings such classics as "Come Fly with Me," "Fly Me to the Moon" and "I've Got You Under My Skin"; Dean croons "Volare" and "That's Amore"; and Sammy does "What Kind of Fool Am I?"

Together, they sing such hits as "Luck Be a Lady," "New York, New York" and "Mack the Knife."

"But we also give you a lot of laughs, too," Hackett promised. "This is a funny, funny musical."

Hackett's script imagines the Rat Pack in their heyday being plunked down in the 21st century.

"It's them in their prime, returning to modern-day Earth," he said, explaining, "God sends them back because they are causing such a ruckus in heaven."

SIFTING THROUGH THE RAT PACK

AP file

The real Rat Pack — Peter Lawford (left), Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Joey Bishop — clown around onstage during a show at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas on Jan. 20, 1960. The woman at left is unidentified.

The story artifice, Hackett noted, "opens up the comedy channels to anything current."

The show's genesis was a phone call Hackett received from Bishop in the late '90s. Bishop told him HBO was making a film about the Rat Pack, adding, "You'd be perfect to play me." Hackett, an actor-comedian who'd followed his dad into showbiz, was flattered by Bishop's call.

Alas, the Bishop role was already cast. Hackett subsequently was disappointed when the 1998 movie, "The Rat Pack," came out; he thought it focused too much on Sinatra's work to get John F. Kennedy elected president. "So I set out on a project that would pay homage to my Uncle Joey and those Rat Pack guys," he said.

Hackett doesn't possess direct Rat Pack bloodlines, but he certainly has Las Vegas ones.

"My parents always said I was conceived at the Sahara," he said with a laugh about the now-defunct Vegas hotel-casino.

Hackett visited Bishop and also interviewed him a couple more times. By the late '90s-early '00s, Bishop was the Pack's lone surviving member. Lawford had died in 1984, Davis Jr. in 1990, Martin in 1995 and Sinatra in 1998.

Contributed photo

Sandy Hackett (center) poses with some of the actor-singers who have appeared in his "Rat Pack Show" in Vegas and around the country. Johnny Edwards (clockwise from top left) is Dean, Hackett is Joey, Doug Starks is Sammy and David DeCosta is Frank.

But Hackett's father also was a resource, possessing what his son called "an unbelievable memory" of the Rat Pack days. It was the elder Hackett who recalled Bishop's catchphrase: sonofagun.

A decade later, the Vegas-based show, which has had at least two prior incarnations, is still going.

Occasionally, they take it on national tour, using a rotating cast. This one, with bookings well into next spring, is visiting a mix of big cities and smaller towns.

It comes amid what Thompson said has been in recent years a renaissance in interest in the time period — something he largely attributed to the critical and cult success of "Mad Men," the AMC series that's deftly imbued in the era's high style.

The Rat Pack, he said, was the "last cool moment of the 1950s" and also was closely associated with the optimism and energy of the Kennedy administration's "Camelot" era in the early 1960s.

But just a few short years later, the Rat Pack was replaced by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Janis Joplin. Suddenly Sinatra, Martin and Davis Jr. seemed like they were from a long-ago time. People poked fun at them.

It, Thompson noted, points up the danger of "being really, really hip — you're only about two weeks away from parody. The minute cool gets defined, cool isn't cool. It's moved on."

But, he added, enough time has passed to where the trajectory has swung back in the Rat Pack's favor, even if some of their humor doesn't play well. They're taken tongue in cheek "but with a great deal of affection," a sort of campy cool.

"Now it's come full circle and they're hip again," Thompson said.

OUR SHOW OF SHOWS

Contributed photo

Johnny Edwards sips and sings as Dean in the Vegas production of "Sandy Hackett's Rat Pack Show." Tony Basile will tackle the role at Civic Arts Plaza.

In addition to writing "Rat Pack," Hackett is the production's director and co-producer. The show's running time is about two hours but "depends on how much I've been drinking," he joked, adding, "No, we ad-lib a lot." If someone yells out something funny or relevant, they'll riff it into the show — just like the Rat Pack did.

Of playing Bishop (who died in 2007), Hackett said, "Joey was very deadpan. He didn't get excited as a performer on stage. But he was very opinionated in his deadpan, and he also was very witty and very articulate.

"Frank, Dean and Sammy were all bigger names," he continued, "but honestly, Joey was the one who wrote all the things they did."

In Thousand Oaks, David DeCosta will play Frank. "He's been singing his whole life, and he's been with us since the show started," Hackett noted. Tony Basile will tackle Dean, and Dezmond Meeks, who was on "America's Got Talent" this season, will portray Sammy.

Lawford, an actor and brother-in-law of JFK, is not represented. Asked why, Hackett quipped, "Well, Peter was English, and they did a Rat Pack show over in England without Sammy, so I'm getting even."

Contributed photo

Frank Sinatra's famed Rat Pack is still enjoying encores in Las Vegas, thanks to tribute shows like "Sandy Hackett's Rat Pack Show." The cast of Hackett's show strikes a shadowy pose on the Vegas strip in this photo, taken in front of Steve Wynn's Encore resort.

His wife's turn as Frank's One Love will have Sinatra aficionados thinking she's actress Ava Gardner — and they'd be right.

Those not up on what Hackett called "their Frank Sinatra mythology" might think it's Nancy Sinatra, Mia Farrow or one of his other wives. But he said the character is based on Gardner, with whom Sinatra had a torrid love affair and a tumultuous and ultimately failed marriage in the 1950s.

The pair will duet on "Wasn't I a Good Time?," a song written by Hackett's wife's father, Ron Miller.

It's been said that Sinatra and Gardner considered the other the love of their lives, and "Wasn't I a Good Time?" can be seen as a gentle lament in the rearview mirror.

"It's a classy, elegant, wonderful and moving touch to the show," Hackett said. "For anyone who's ever had a relationship that didn't work out, it's a very poignant song."

LEGENDS AND LEGACIES

Contributed photo

Sandy Hackett, as Joey, gets to clown around — a lot — in his "Rat Pack Show."

The show also cleans up things from the Rat Pack era that don't fly today. In 1960, Hackett noted, "you could make fun of Sammy for being short, black, having one eye and being Jewish, and Dean for being Italian."

Not anymore. When he first started doing the show, Hackett found things that didn't work with today's sensibilities.

"We went through the show and took away everything that I call 'butt tighteners,' where you're sitting up in your seat going, 'Hmm, I don't know about that one,' " Hackett said. "Maybe in the 1960s you could say that, but not now."

One thing Sinatra and company never said in those days was the term "Rat Pack," instead referring to themselves as the Summit and occasionally the Clan.

Sinatra disliked the Rat Pack name, Hackett noted, because he had great respect for its original owners — actor Humphrey Bogart's 1950s crowd.

Contributed photo

Sandy Hackett (second from left), as Joey Bishop, poses with some of the performers who have starred in his Vegas-based "Rat Pack Show." Doug Starks (left) is Sammy, David DeCosta is Frank and Johnny Edwards is Dean.

The legend goes that Bogart's wife, Lauren Bacall, gave them the name after she came downstairs one night, saw Bogey and his buds straggling in from a hard night of carousing and muttered that they looked like "a goddamned rat pack."

It's thought Sinatra was one of those 4 a.m. rats that night.

"Frank wanted his own moniker, but it stuck and that's the way it is," Hackett said.

It's a bygone era. Vegas, despite its Sin City marketing nod to its reputation, has moved toward more family-oriented entertainment. Not only is the Sahara dead, but the Sands — another Rat Pack haunt said to be their headquarters — also is nothing but dust in the wind.

But for a few short years, it was something. The Rat Pack succeeded by capturing an era's certain cool — but talent didn't hurt either. In their heyday, according to Hackett, Sinatra was the No. 1 concert attraction, recording artist and film star.

"No one else," he said, "ever had that title in all three areas."

Hackett clearly has a fondness for that time. He's preparing a one-man show dedicated to his father called "My Buddy." He hopes to have it out next year.

Right now, he's sorting through fedoras and cocktails and preparing to fete a famous pack.

Said Hackett: "To revisit Joey and the Rat Pack is an honor."