IN THE late 1950s, Las Vegas was a swinging city and no more so than when the self-styled Rat Pack came to town.
Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jnr were ostensibly there to film the movie Ocean's Eleven. In the event they created a whole new 24-hour lifestyle.
By day they would be mugging their way through the film directed by the hapless Lewis Milestone and by night it was a recipe of babes, booze and bad behaviour.
They would also appear together - sometimes with sidekicks actor Peter Lawford and comedian Joey Bishop - at the Sands Hotel where they turned a stage act into a party with japes mixed in with the songs.
This was a legendary period which has gone down in entertainment history but was a hedonistic life that would eventually burn itself out. Within a few years, The Beatles and other guitar groups were dominating the music scene.
The Rat Pack singers went on to make their own important solo contributions to music and when, one by one, they died, a whole era seemed to have vanished.
But not quite. The Rat Pack antics eventually became a show in itself, Rat Pack Live From Las Vegas, a recreation of the Sands Hotel performances which toured this country - including Liverpool - and finally landed in the West End to pick up an Olivier Award nomination. It still tours and arrives at Liverpool's Empire Theatre for a further week-long run from Monday, August 15.
The line-up has changed this time around with Ali Laurie playing Sammy, Nigel Casey as Dean and Henry Prego as the Chairman of the Board, Frank Sinatra.
Prego has done this sort of thing before, notably in Las Vegas itself. But he admits that Sinatra was to come late in his life.
Now "in my 40s" he was "in my 30s" when he finally took the plunge to turn from a rocker into a crooner.
