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NY POST/MICHAEL RIEDEL THIS Partridge has flown the coop.
David Cassidy abruptly pulled the plug on his show 'The Rat Pack Is Back!' after disputes with the owner of the Supper Club, where the production was slated to open Monday.
A permanent fixture in TV Land as Keith in 'The Partridge Family,' Cassidy wrote, produced and directed the revue, which re-created a Las Vegas performance of the legendary Rat Pack.
Pushing the audience's willing suspension of disbelief to its limit, the 55-year-old actor also appeared in the show as a 25-year-old Bobby Darin.
'The Rat Pack Is Back!' started previews Nov. 17.
A week later, Cassidy told the cast the show was going on hiatus while he attempted to work things out with the Supper Club.
As recently as last week, Cassidy was giving interviews to coincide with next week's opening.
On Saturday, the cast learned the show was being shelved permanently, and that Cassidy, who had retreated to his home in Florida, wouldn't be returning to New York.
'We were told he could not accommodate the demands being made on him,' says Michael Civisca, who was playing Frank Sinatra.
Neither Cassidy nor the Supper Club would comment on the nature of the dispute, but production sources say it stemmed from Cassidy's decision to sign his cast to Actors Equity contracts.
That opened the way for the union to gain a foothold at the Supper Club, a non-union theater.
'He didn't know what he was doing,' says a production source. 'You don't have to sign a union contract in that theater. But once you do, you're f - - - ed.'
Once the contracts were signed, an Equity inspector showed up to examine the theater's dressing rooms to make sure they were up to union standards.
The owners of the Supper Club were furious.
Cassidy, sources say, tried to assure them he would be able to keep the union off their backs, but his relationship with the theater owners quickly began to deteriorate.
In a statement issued over the weekend, Cassidy said he closed 'The Rat Pack Is Back!' due to 'unforeseen and irreconcilable circumstances on both artistic and managerial levels.'
On the artistic level, people involved in the show say it wasn't that bad, though Cassidy's Bobby Darin cameo did raise a few eyebrows.
The actor would sit in the audience until one of the Rat Packers would say, 'And now we have a special guest, Mr. Bobby Darin!'
Cassidy, says a source, would then 'come out of the audience like a bolt of lightning,' performing his two songs - 'Mack the Knife' and 'Beyond the Sea' - 'with the energy of a tsunami.'
He'd bound over to the saxophone player and shout in his ear: 'Hey, man, give me the reeds!'
'The guy playing the saxophone was terrified,' says a production source. 'He winced every time David came near him.'
Cassidy also exhorted the audience to snap their fingers along with him.
If not enough people started snapping, he'd yell: 'Hey, I said, snap your fingers!'
'They were trying to eat, but he was so aggressive, they'd drop their knives and forks and try to snap with him,' says a source.
It wasn't easy, since Cassidy sometimes had trouble finding the beat, so the finger snapping was all over the place.
Still, the audience did warm up to Cassidy, if not as Darin then as Keith Partridge.
'He got his start as a teen idol,' says Civisca. 'And the audience still responds to him that way.'
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