Eclectic Company: One Mo' Time With The Rat Pack

I’ve always secretly (guiltily) really loved the razzle-dazzle of large, glitzy, rehearsed stage shows, so I pretty much went crazy a few weeks ago when Banners brought in “The Rat Pack Is Back” to play to the packed house in the Civic Center’s Rosa Hart theatre.

After a brief comedic warm-up by a janitor dressed in a mop wig and moustache, the grand drape opened on a tuxedoed semi-familiar 12-piece band, playing from their “RP” emblazoned band stands and at the grand piano, as a cinematic montage of famous faces, sights and events from the original Rat Pack’s Las Vegas era played silently on the curtains behind them. Was there a drum roll? There must’ve been a drum roll, because we knew the moment when Frank and Dean would stride onstage waving lit cigarettes and brandishing cocktails. And there they were, four familiar faces draped in cool slash-pocket, tapered leg suits. I was slammed right back to the 1950s and ‘60s I’d seen in countless films on small screen and widescreen, drawn in by the lights and the glamour. Then Joey Bishop made one of his signature snarky jokes about Dick Van Dyke, Dean Martin sang “Volare” with the majestic audience choir chiming in, and I went straight to cloud nine. You just had to be there; it was pure magic.

For the space of two taut sets, Joey Bishop, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra had come back from the dead, channeled by San Franciscan comedian and song-and-dance man Mickey Joseph (Joey), jazz-trained Staten Islander and Dean Martin look-alike Drew Anthony (ooh that voice, that shimmering silver suit, that pompadour curl! said all the gals seated around me in the fourth row), gospel singer and Atchison, Kansas’s own Kenny Jones breathing life into black-Jewish-Puerto Rican entertainer Sammy, and from Joisey — where else? (Red Hook, to be precise), C.J. Sinestro’s louche and lean Chairman of the Board, to recreate three glorious weeks in 1960 when Frank and his pals spent their evenings at Las Vegas’s Sands Hotel doing nightclub shtick for kicks, and their days at work filming the original Ocean’s 11.

For the Lake Charles appearance of “The Rat Pack Is Back,” production manager (and former Polynesian dancer!?!) Donlee Cardejon brought in the voices, sound and lighting directors, and understated bandleader Richard Hall, who tightly led a dozen local and regional musicians through one two-hour rehearsal, then conducted the 90+ minute fast-paced two-act show from the keyboard in dress casual hipster wear topped by a perfect porkpie hat. Performing singly and together, with Mickey Joseph deadpanning Joey Bishop’s risqué lines, the quartet sang more than 20 well-known numbers, which represents only a tiny fraction of the Rat Pack’s decades of hits, swinging mightily through “You’re Nobody ‘Til Somebody Loves You” (Dino), “That Old Black Magic” (Sammy), “Fly Me To The Moon” (Frank), “[That’s Why] The Lady Is A Tramp” (the ensemble), and closing with a storming rendition of “Birth of the Blues,” rightly earning thunderous applause and a standing ovation.

After they’d signed programs and posed for photos with a steady stream of departing audience members, the cast and crew adjourned to the Green Room, and I snagged the Surrey, U.K.-born bandleader for a chat. Hall told me he was the show’s substitute leader (meaning he rarely plays with these gents when they’re resident nightly in Vegas at the new Copa room of the Plaza Hotel & Casino), and loves the energy and music of the show, which varies only slightly when substitute vocalists take the Frank, Sammy, Dino or Joey roles on the road. “One rehearsal is all it takes when you have professionals to work with,” Hall said, praising the night’s players. When asked how many of the Rosa Hart band were locals, Hall deferred to music contractor and McNeese professor Rick Condit, who had assembled the band.

Condit, who played lead alto sax and flute in “The Rat Pack Is Back” band, spoke to me from the road (with a different band tour) and said he was very proud of the many McNeese faculty members and graduates among the “Rat Pack Is Back” band, including Bill Rose (trombone), Tim McMillen (trombone), Jay Ecker (upright bass), Ricky Peters (trumpet) and Justin Pierce (alto sax), especially considering that there are few area gigs where professional musicians can find regular work. “I might do three or four of these kinds of shows in Lake Charles in a typical year,” Condit said, explaining that no one can make a fulltime living in the area by playing music, so every instrumentalist who chooses to stay here finds other work, such as teaching music (Condit, Rose and Ecker have all taught at McNeese; Ecker’s also at Westlake High, McMillen teaches at Sulphur’s Lewis Middle School). “We brought in five musicians from Houston, New Orleans, and Lafayette for the Lake Charles show, and of course, Richard Hall came with the tour. But when I performed in the show last year in Beaumont, Lafayette, and Corpus Christi, I worked with about half of the same musicians who performed at Rosa Hart,” Condit told me. “In past years there were occasional gigs at Coushatta, and these days at L‘Auberge. Considering the size of Lake Charles, it’s fantastic that we have so many players who can work on these types of shows when they come our way.”

Backstage I chatted with C.J. Sinestro about historically-accurate stagewear (he fingered his tux’s skinny lapels, and said he was looking for another vintage bowtie to flesh out his collection), with Drew Anthony about the work of performing as Martin every night (“he really didn’t drink as much as audiences thought he did”) and with Mickey Joseph about making time to do his own standup act when he’s off the road. But I forgot to ask them how they felt about having to smoke so much onstage, because true to their admirers, followers, and cohorts in the era of Mad Men, the Rat Pack smoked like chimneys and drank like fish, so the “Rat Pack Is Back” is replete with reminders of both excesses.

Drifting home that night, after a couple of hours next door at the Imperial Calcasieu Museum’s funk-drenched Boogaloo fundraiser, I remembered my ex-mother-in-law, Ginny, who was a big Sinatra fan, so every Christmas my ex-husband gave her a different Sinatra record wrapped in a clumsy disguise. This was especially difficult to do when albums were 12” LPs in cardboard sleeves, but even knowing there was a record to be found did not diminish one iota from the inevitable reveal. After oohing and ahhing over that year’s treasure, Ginny would put the record on, and we’d sing and she’d dance. How cool was that?

Well Ginny was married in the 1950s when both Brando and Sinatra were plying their wares in Hollywood, where she’d gone for her honeymoon. She told me about this incredible time with mock bitterness, because apparently her newly wedded groom wouldn’t take her to see Brando during the opening week of On The Waterfront or to hear Sinatra’s “comeback” show at a major L.A. venue. She was only mock bitter, but I was sad for her and for me, and I privately wondered why she didn’t dump him right then and there. I mean, missing both “I coulda been a contendah, instead of a bum, which is what I am,” and “[Why not take] All of Me”? What was he thinking?

By the time I’d met Ginny, I was living where On the Waterfront had been filmed and Ol’ Blue Eyes had been born — Hoboken, New Jersey — which I named New York’s West Bank when friends asked for my address. (For true New Yorkers, anywhere over the bridges or through the tunnels from Manhattan is the hinterlands, home of the least hip, the last place you’d look to find cool.) While I lived there, a TV biopic — Sinatra — was filmed on location, and the production company freshened up empty storefronts and brownstones near Sinatra’s childhood home on Monroe near 4th, earning complaints from nearby residents, but making the empty apartments a little more marketable in the show’s wake.

Kenny Jones had a niece in town so he didn’t stick around after the show, and I didn’t get to ask how he’d gotten to sing the lion’s share of the show’s solo numbers in his pure, clear sweet voice, or which song he liked best. My own favorite? Hands down it was “Mr. Bojangles,” which I’ve loved since the first time I heard it, performed with heartbreaking intensity by songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker’s sometime sideman, the incredible guitarist and big band leader David Bromberg, at the Philadelphia Folk Festival, many years ago. Bromberg still tours, mostly in the east, and Walker occasionally graces the stage at a Lake Charles casino, so you can hear acoustic versions of the song to compare with Jones’s lithe and limber version when you’re next in Vegas.