Hearing Voices

Rich Little is killing time onstage, doing the hurry up and wait during rehearsals for his new show at the Golden Nugget.

He tells the band a story about Jack Benny. He does a John Wayne riff.

Only a couple of us are sitting in the theater seats and not running around as part of the Nugget's crew, tending to overhead lights or sound issues.

So it's not clear whom the impressionist is addressing when he says, on mic but apparently out of the blue: "Someone asked me, 'Do you do any current film stars, or do you just do the old ones?'

"I said, 'Current film stars? Like who?' "

"Well, DiCaprio."

"What?"

"Matt Damian?

"What?"

"Ben Affleck?"

"I don't think so."

"Brad Pitt?"

"Maybe if you put a baby over your shoulder ..."

"I think we'd all be doing the current film stars if they could be imitated," he says.

After the rehearsal, Little elaborates in the Nugget's dressing room. "Everybody says, 'Bring your act up to date and get more current.' I'm aware of that more than anybody: 'Rich Little, he does all dead people.' "

The criticism became more high-profile when Little was announced as the entertainment for the White House Correspondents Association dinner in April. The booking was widely perceived as a safe counterswing to Stephen Colbert's stinging monologue at the previous year's affair.

Little did give the correspondents a John McCain impression, and he says he is working on Fred Thompson and Dr. Phil for the Nugget show.

But when it comes to his first love, movies, he says all impressionists have been set back by Hollywood's current atmosphere of high concepts and special effects eclipsing actual stars. "If you think about the current box office leading men today, there isn't anybody imitating them."

Those who think the 69-year-old impressionist is too safely ensconced in old Hollywood should know that it could be worse.

"My idea of a perfect show -- which I would never do -- would be to go out there and do all character actors," he says. "It would probably appeal to about two people," he says, then reels off some of the obscure voices he can do: "Zacharay Scott and Herbert Marshall and Walter Brennan, James Mason, Thomas Mitchell, Charles Bickford ..."

The Nugget's chairman, Tilman Fertitta, met Little through a mutual friend, Houston TV anchor Dave Ward, and invited the impressionist to perform 20 weeks; the first stint runs through Dec. 3, then resumes New Year's Eve through April 6.

The impressionist has lived in Las Vegas continuously since the early 1990s, and on and off since the mid-1960s. He started to play Las Vegas, co-billed with reigning stars such as Jack Jones, after appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show" and a supporting role on the 1966 sitcom "Love on a Rooftop" elevated his profile.

"In those days, by the time you did three or four (Sullivan shows) you were pretty well-known throughout the country, because everyone watched Ed Sullivan in those days," Little says. "Today, there's way too much television to let one show turn you into anything."

The native of Ottawa, Canada, was acting in little theater productions by the time he was 12, and says the impressions came along by accident.

"Wanting to be an actor, I had seen so many movies that I would come home and act out the film for my folks, doing the whole plot and some of the characters," he says.

His parents would tell friends they didn't have to see movies because "our son does them for us."

Little couldn't have asked for better timing to cross over as an impressionist. The public embraced Will Jordan doing Sullivan on Sullivan's show, and Vaughan Meader's comedy album "The First Family" added a new twist to political humor in late 1962, spoofing John F. Kennedy.

But it was Frank Gorshin who pointed the way to impressions as a long-form nightclub act. "Gorshin started to do scenes from 'Camelot' and had a throne made, started to do impressions of Richard Burton with sets and stuff," Little says.

Little has returned to that theatrical concept of late. "The Presidents" allowed him to deliver fully costumed impressions of eight presidents in a theatrical vehicle. And now he's writing a one-man show based on the earliest voice he perfected, James Stewart.

"When I finish here, I'm going to do it. I'm going to take it on the road and hope to take it to Broadway," he says.

He passed on "Say Goodnight, Gracie," the George Burns tribute which instead became a final tour de force for Gorshin before he died in 2005. "I didn't just want to stand for two hours and do a monologue. I thought it was kind of boring," Little says of the play (which was eventually shortened to 90 minutes).

Little also wanted to add different voices instead of staying in character as Burns the entire time.

His experience with "The Presidents" also convinced him, "If I'm ever going to do another one-man show, I'm going to own it all. By the time you get through paying (collaborators) you have nothing."

A Stewart show also would be a labor of love. "When I was a kid, Jimmy was definitely one of my idols. To think that I became friends with him and worked with him and knew him very well ..." he trails off.

"That's the one thing about my career, was getting to know my idols. I knew so many people that I admired as a kid."

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