Rat Pack Spends West End Xmas & New Year at Wyndham’s

The Rat Pack are heading back into the West End this winter, playing a limited five-week season from 20 December 2011 to 21 January 2012 at Wyndham’s Theatre – incredibly, the show’s eighth West End home.

The festive version, Christmas With the Rat Pack, will launch the schedule, running until 7 January. From 9 to 21 January, the Christmas tree and decorations will be packed away to finish the engagement for the final two weeks from 9 to 21 January with the standard version The Rat Pack Live from Las Vegas.

The action is set in the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas where, in 1960 during the filming of Ocean’s Eleven, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford performed together on stage for the first time. From then on, they were known as the Rat Pack and Las Vegas was their domain – everywhere else, in Rat Pack vocabulary, was “Dullsville, Ohio”.

In the stage show, a trio of Sinatra, Davis and Martin look- and sound-alikes, accompanied by the ‘Berrelli Sisters’, perform Rat Pack classics including “Witchcraft”, “The Lady Is a Tramp”, “Mr Bojangles”, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”, “That’s Amore”, “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime”, “New York, New York”, “My Kinda Town”, “Fly Me to the Moon”, “Volare”, “My Way” and “Memories Are Made Of This”.

After premiering at the London Palladium, The Rat Pack launched its first West End season at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in March 2003. It has played additional one-off dates and full seasons at the Peacock, the Strand (now renamed the Novello), the Savoy, the Adelphi and the Theatre Royal Drury Lane.

Simultaneous with the new West End season, a touring version of The Rat Pack will visit 23 venues across the UK in November, December and January. The show is directed and choreographed by Mitch Sebastian, with vocal and music supervision by Matthew Freeman. It’s produced by Paul Walden and Derek Nicol for Flying Entertainment Ltd.

Currently at Wyndham’s, Josie Rourke’s production of Much Ado About Nothing, starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate, concludes on 3 September 2011. It’s followed, from 26 September to 17 December, by the Broadway transfer of Driving Miss Daisy, starring Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones.