Eric Jordan Young hopes this is his (Sammy) moment

The obscurity of the song Eric Jordan Young rehearses to open his show — a 1968 Sammy Davis Jr. album cut, “Shake, Shake, Shake” — tells much of what you need to know about him.

“Oh yeah, they’re gonna see a new completely different me,” he sings midway through.

Maybe. It’s no overnight makeover, but a lifelong devotion to Davis and other variety entertainers of his era that drove Young to create his own song-and-dance vehicle, “Shakin’.”

“I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the people who inspire me,” Young says after the rehearsal. “All of those triple-threat entertainers and people who put themselves on the line.”

And Young’s new showcase, opening Saturday in the Sin City Theatre at Planet Hollywood Resort, isn’t completely different from the persona thousands of people have seen on the other side of Planet Hollywood’s retail mall.

Young was the singing, dancing host of the similarly retro-leaning “Vegas the Show” at the Saxe Theater for four years and more than 2,000 performances, before leaving earlier this year. Now he’s launching “Shakin’ ” through the production company he started four years ago to stage cruise-ship revues.

It’s a relatively modest risk: a 90-day run for a 5:30 p.m. show in a comedy club. Still, it comes with a live band and dancers, and the need for audiences to invest in a star vehicle for a star they’ve probably never heard of — at least by his own name (along with some Broadway and TV credits, he answered to Ernie as the neon graveyard caretaker in the “Vegas” show).

“I know that people don’t know who I am. Do I deserve a place on the Las Vegas Strip? I don’t know,” he says.

“I have always been ambitious. I don’t like being told no, and I don’t like it when people say ‘You can’t do that.’ I generally have a response that’s in the world of, ‘Why not?’ ”

And since the Buffalo, N.Y., native first worked in the cast of “Starlight Express” at the Las Vegas Hilton in 1993, “people have been very generous to me” in Las Vegas, he says. “I’m not looking at the negative of it.”

The subtitle of “Shakin’ ” is “Classic Vegas Remixed with a Twist.” It sums up Young’s strategy of giving new arrangements to familiar standards such as “That Old Black Magic” or Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” and mixing in more forgotten oldies such as “Baretta’s Theme (‘Keep Your Eye on the Sparrow’).”

The ’70s-TV influence doesn’t stop with the songs. There will be sketches, too, revealing another childhood influence: Flip Wilson and his drag alter-ego Geraldine.

“I’m putting myself out on the line here and I’m fulfilling a dream,” Young says. “I’m really going for it.”

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.