Danny Gans: How an unknown impressionist became the biggest act on the Vegas Strip

LAS VEGAS — It was easy to assume Las Vegas had seen it all, at least twice, during its first 90 years.

Performing bears. Topless ice skaters. For a while, people couldn’t get enough of watching the mushroom clouds from nearby atom bomb tests.

Seemingly everything that could possibly pass as entertainment had been tried.

Then came the city’s 91st year and the arrival of a singing impressionist with virtually no name recognition — even his nickname, “The Man of Many Voices,” was underwhelming — who became the biggest act in town seemingly on Day One.

You could build a thousand Las Vegases on a thousand planets and still not produce a less likely superstar than Danny Gans, whose death on May 1, 2009, left a hole in this city that’s yet to be filled.

Gans connected with locals, celebrities

“No one’s ever been as successful doing impressions,” Rich Little once told us of Gans.

He also perfectly summarized the strange place Gans occupied in the entertainment ecosystem. “In Butte, Montana, they never heard of him. But in Vegas, he was a superstar.”

Gans was almost impossibly charismatic. He had to have been to attract turnaway crowds to see him perform both sides of the Nat King Cole-Natalie Cole “Unforgettable” duet from 1991 and both the Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn parts in a scene from 1981’s “On Golden Pond” — in this millennium.

Other signature pieces — of approximately 200 voices in his arsenal, he’d deploy around 60 per show — included achingly poignant tributes to George Burns and Sammy Davis Jr., an Al Pacino monologue from 1992’s “Scent of a Woman” and a bit with Kermit the Frog.

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