Return of the Rat Pack

The originals: Dean, Sammy and Frank
10 April 2012

Two Italians, a Jew and a black man walk into a bar. The first two are Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, the last two are Sammy Davis Jr, and the bar is the Copa Room of the Sands Hotel And Casino in Las Vegas. All three men appear surprisingly lively, singing, dancing and mercilessly ribbing each other, considering the fact that it is some years since they, along with the room itself, disappeared beneath the dirt.

This is The Rat Pack - Live From Las Vegas, an uncanny recreation of the ad hoc entertainments that Sinatra's crew staged at the Sands in 1960 after a day's filming on Ocean's Eleven. The fact that, after a single date at London's Peacock Theatre last year, this tribute show is about to occupy the venerable Haymarket Theatre for a six-week run is testament to both its verisimilitude and the enduring appeal of the Rat Pack and their booze'n'broads ways.

For the guys are bigger now than they have been for 40 years. The past few years have seen Ocean's Eleven remade by Steven Soderbergh, a tribute to Sammy Davis Jr staged at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, a play based on Shaun Levy's best-selling, egos-and-all book Rat Pack Confidential, and Robbie Williams's tribute to the Pack's music, Swing When You're Winning. The Rat Pack are back, or maybe they never went away - industry sources estimate Sinatra has sold around 100,000 albums a year since his death in 1988.

Stephen Triffit, who plays Sinatra in the Haymarket show, believes that interest in these old-style entertainers, who stuck to their big-band sound and their sharp suits when rock'n'roll first reared its hollering head, enjoyed a resurgence as a response to the first wave of squeaky-clean boybands in the Nineties. 'The appeal is obvious - the booze, the broads, the attitude,' he says. 'Every man wanted to be them, and every woman wanted to be with them.' Mark Adams, who plays Dean Martin, sums it up: 'They were gentlemen behaving badly.'

Indeed they were, but also masters of their game. As Adams points out, the trio crossed over from song to film to comedy with a sort of screw-you insouciance that hasn't been seen since. (Think of the Beatles's self-conscious films. Then think of Madonna's entire movie career.) The Rat Pack - we're talking Frank, Dean and Sammy here, not the second rank of Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop - took stardom as their due, and really didn't seem to care what anybody thought. Sammy crashed through the race barrier, the first black man to perform in casinos that wouldn't serve him at the bar (until Frank insisted).

'People always used to say I looked like Sammy and I hated it,' says George Daniel Long, who plays Davis Jr in the Rat Pack stage show, 'but having researched his life, I have a greater appreciation of what he went through.'

Some of what Sammy went through is included in the show - the jokes about the Ku Klux Klan from his good friends Frank and Dino, the nicknames 'Smoky' and 'boy'- to show that these guys weren't saints.

'We had to put aspects of that in,' says Long, 'because that's what it was like.' There are gentler nods to the prejudices Sammy faced - and the preferences he had. Three women perform as a backing band, and when they pair off with the men, Sammy always gets the blonde.

Of course, playing these guys isn't easy. Is it an impersonation, or a characterisation? 'A bit of both,' concedes Mark Adams. The audience has paid to see the Rat Pack, so that's what they get, and the three actors have picked up tips from their backing band, some of whom played with the originals. Long is the living spit of Sammy, Adams has Martin's laconic charm, but it is Stephen Triffit whose performance is uncanny.

His story is also the stuff of showbiz myth. Stephen Triffit was selling timeshare apartments in Tenerife when he was persuaded to sing 'New York, New York' in a karaoke bar. Friends said he was good, so on returning to the UK Triffit became a house-husband to three children by day, a Sinatra-impersonater at £45 a throw by night. He applied to Stars In Their Eyes in order to up his cabaret fee and failed three times - his wife put him forward a fourth time and he came second in the live heats. Then a chance photograph of him with Bob Geldof was printed in OK!, an American producer saw it, and he signed Triffit up to play Sinatra in The Main Event, a showcase at a casino in Atlantic City.

Now Triffit seems slightly bewildered to have had Francis Albert Sinatra take over his life so entirely. He will be leaving The Rat Pack - Live From Las Vegas after four weeks to tour his own Sinatra show. 'I have come to know him very well - the good bits and the bad,' says Triffit, 'and at the moment this is my career. I'd love to introduce new people to his music, maybe young people who only know the Robbie Williams version. But, you know, Sinatra's songs are actually at the bottom of my range. It would be nice for people to know I had a voice of my own.'

  • The Rat Pack - Live From Las Vegas, previews from Tue 11 Mar, first night Tue 18 Mar, Haymarket Theatre, Haymarket, SW1 (0870 901 3356).

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