Had a fun time at Divaville this afternoon. Playlist is here if you're interested.
After the show Georg and I had a quick dinner at the Q Shack and then went to "The Rat Pack Live at the Sands," a Rat Pack impersonator show. It was great! They did almost all the songs we wanted to hear, and lots of gags and routines from real Rat Pack shows. We've got several real shows on CD and we recognized a lot of the jokes. I was surprised that they didn't flinch from the politically incorrect nature of the humor -- even including gags like Dean picking up Sammy and thanking the NAACP for the trophy.
The guys playing Frank and Sammy were outstanding. The Frank guy had it all: he looked like him, sounded like him, sang like him. And the Sammy guy, well he wasn't physically quite right -- stockier and taller than the real Sammy -- and he couldn't dance as well, but really, who can? His physical impersonation of Sammy was very good, and even though his dancing wasn't to the same level he made it work by doing simpler movements in Sammy's style. And his voice, my goodness, if you closed your eyes you could almost believe it was Sammy. The program said that Sammy Davis Jr. called this guy the best impersonator of himself that he had ever heard, and I believe it. I was most impressed when he started doing impressions, which the real Sammy did of course, and he managed to sound like Sammy impersonating John Wayne, Louis Armstrong, etc. Now that is talent. I could even forgive him for singing an anachronistic song like "Mr. Bojangles." Especially since he also did my favorite Sammy song, "Falling in Love Again," which I had coincidentally played on Divaville just a couple of hours before.
The Dean guy was weak in comparison, but not nearly as bad as, say, Ray Liotta in The Rat Pack (that HBO movie a few years ago). This guy wasn't nearly that bad; he just didn't look like Dean (way too short) and didn't sound like him (about an octave too high). He did have Dean's vocal mannerisms, but his voice was just too different to carry it off. Georg and I agreed that he sounded more like Dino in the spoken parts of the show. Most of the time though, I felt like I was watching Frank, Sammy, and some guy trying to imitate Dean.
Still, that's a minor quibble over a wonderful show that we enjoyed very much. And the best part is, the annoying talking people shut up when I asked them to! And stayed quiet for the rest of the show! Wow, I love when that happens.
1 Comments
Thanks for the review!
I saw the Frank Sintra actor interviewed on one of the local TV shows, while I was cranking on an exercise bike. The actor seemed like a reasonably nice and sharp guy, and he was a good sport answering the questions he's probably been asked a hundred times before.
God, but I hate local television news. The sales/marketing guru Jeffrey Gitomer once wrote something like, "the best easy gift you can give to your life and schedule is to skip the 30 minutes you currently waste watching local news."