Frank and the boys, swingin’ again

“One guy starts a song, and the other two are in the wings spoofing on each line he sings,’’ said Rockland native Dick Feeney, of his Las Vegas-style stage show, “The Rat Pack Is Back.’’ “Sometimes they couldn’t get through a song.’’

Centered around Frank Sinatra - the other principals were Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Joey Bishop - the Rat Pack took its buddies act to the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in 1960, when all four were in Las Vegas to make the original “Ocean’s Eleven’’ movie.

Partially scripted, and largely improvised, the show was emceed by standup comic Bishop and featured songs by Martin, Davis, and Sinatra, and dance numbers with Davis and pack cronies such as Peter Lawford. “They wandered off to the wings, parodied each other, did impressions, and poured drinks from a bar cart they rolled onstage,’’ Max Rudin wrote in “The Rat Pack,’’ an essay in his book “Las Vegas: An Unconventional History.’’

A writer and producer of Las Vegas shows since 1985, Feeney had access to the film archives at the hotel where the pack performed as he and partner Sandy Hackett developed their tribute show. “We borrowed some of the stuff they did and adapted it.’’ There was also “a lot you can’t do,’’ he said, either because it’s politically incorrect today or it doesn’t work outside of its original context. The Rat Packers all drank, and Davis chain-smoked on stage. Sinatra called the girls in the show “broads.’’

While “toning it down a bit,’’ said Feeney, he and Hackett allowed the rhythms and interactions of the original to guide their own version of the Las Vegas show.

Hackett, a comedian himself, is the son of famous ’60s comic Buddy Hackett. “He learned from the best,’’ Feeney said. “Joey Bishop was like an uncle to him.’’

“The Rat Pack is Back’’ stars a singer, Brian Duprey, with a voice that sounds a lot like his idol, Sinatra. Singer Drew Anthony looks like Martin. Singer and songwriter Kyle Diamond plays Davis, and comic Mickey Joseph (author of the humorous memoir “What Would Don Corleone Do?’’) plays Bishop. The show features the timeless songs Sinatra and the others made famous and a full 12-piece band, Feeney said.

At 57, Feeney is a little too young to have experienced the Rat Pack show first-hand. Rudin attributes its free-wheeling, no holds barred style to the postwar self-assertion of ethnic and racial groups who no longer felt cowed by the Anglo-Saxon definition of “class.’’ For ethnic Americans, Rudin writes, the Rat Pack offered both “reassurance and exhilaration: a past of the guys on the block, coming up the hard way, ethnic jokes and attitudes; a future of complete assimilation, wealth, swinging fun’’ and American success.

English actor Lawford, who sometimes took part in the shows, stood in for the passé Anglo-Saxon ascendancy and served as the frequent butt of jokes.

Feeney earned his own show business stripes in the early ’70s. After graduating from Rockland High School, he attended area colleges for two years before choosing to play full-time in a series of popular club bands. He played trumpet in a “Chicago’’ style rock band and in a 1940s music revival group.

Tired of traveling, in 1981 he devised a stage show designed for cities with a steady stream of tourists - “a ’40s set, with horns, dancers, girl singers’’ called “Lullaby of Swing’’ - and in 1985 went to Las Vegas to co-produce “An Evening at La Cage.’’ In 1991, he produced “Viva Las Vegas,’’ which played for 18 years, the longest-running show in Vegas history. He also created a traveling show based on skydiving Elvis impersonators called the “The Flying Elvi.’’

Designed as a Las Vegas casino show, “The Rat Pack is Back’’ is the first Las Vegas show that’s made the jump successfully to the “legitimate’’ theaters at which Broadway shows are aimed. Broadway shows have gone to Las Vegas, Feeney said, but the reverse had not happened until he took his tribute show on the road four years ago.

Currently playing at the Stoneham Theatre through July 26, the show goes to the Cape Cod Melody Tent July 28 before coming to the South Shore Music Circus in Cohasset July 29.

Feeney was back in Rockland earlier this year when he was inducted into the Rockland High School Academic Hall of Fame in May.

Robert Knox can be reached at rc.knox2@gmail.com.