With unemployment exceeding 10% as of this writing, we’re not sure people who live in Las Vegas are "lucky" … but we digress.
Your question conflates two rival "Rat Pack" shows, but it’s a common misconception. Until April 2002, a Cassidy-produced show, The Rat Pack, was in residence at the Sahara. Around the corner (more or less), Sandy Hackett and Dick Feeny were co-producing The Tribute to Sammy, Frank, Joey and Dean at the Greek Isles.
When Cassidy’s show closed, he sublicensed the "Rat Pack" name to Hackett and Feeny. Thus was born The Rat Pack is Back! Publicist Renée Roberts informs LVA that it relocated downtown "several years ago." She added that the touring version, owned by the same company, has a less solid cast, one that changes regularly.
In addition to playing Joey Bishop in the Las Vegas cast, Sandy Hackett (son of Buddy Hackett) wrote the revue. So as writer, co-star and co-producer, we’d have to say he is substantially responsible for the "art" and partly responsible for the "crap" that you experienced.
While there aren’t any competing "Rat Pack" shows per se, there are some tangentially related tribute shows in town. The Riviera has An Evening with Dean and Friends, in which Tom Stevens "tributizes" Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. We guess you could call him a one-man Rat Pack.
The Riv also plays host to Barbra & Frank: The Concert that Never Was, a title that is pretty self-explanatory. (LVA readers give it a five-star rating.) You can’t throw a rock in this town without hitting an impersonator – not that we’d recommend it – but those are the most Rat Pack-centric shows we could find.
