Stewart focus helps, but Little wise to keep working on his show

“Does this name ring a bell to you: Arthur Godfrey?”

Affirmative applause to answer both questions – after all, he’s not asking about Channing Tatum – means Rich Little is on the right track by moving his musty variety act into a more focused premise, “Jimmy Stewart & Friends.”

By narrating the show as Stewart, and not speaking in his own Rich voice until the coda, Little-as-Stewart even gets to turn the question upon himself: “Rich Little was on a lot of those (Dean Martin) roasts. Do you remember him? What the hell ever happened to him?”

At 73, Little isn’t going to draw too many ticket-buyers to LVH who don’t remember the talent-show host, the guy who played Elliot Ness, or the most popular impressionist of the 1970s.

Channeling those talents into a Stewart biography gives new structure and purpose to Little’s arsenal of old Hollywood voices, which as recently as last year carried the scent of mothballs in the scattered variety format.

The new theatrical structure in the intimate cabaret setting plays up Little’s enduring strengths: his core arsenal of still-effective impressions and his lifelong love of the movies.

Keeping the focus on Stewart also helps Little kick an old habit: trying to sing. His vocal impressions sounded more like bad karaoke than the man long regarded as the master of his craft. Shedding a band for recorded cues helps Little avoid the temptation of singing more than a few lines as Louis Armstrong and a comedic Dean Martin.

This is not to say the jokes are better. Little also makes a self-aware crack or two about the groans induced by ba-dump-a-bump one-liners of the Allen & Rossi school – which are logical if you know that Steve Rossi himself helped craft this showcase.

But the impressions no longer come up randomly. With Stewart’s life and career as the connecting thread, Jack Lemmon drops in because he was in “Bell, Book and Candle.” Dean Martin because he was Stewart’s co-star in “Bandolero.”

Jack Nicholson? As Little tells it, Stewart and his wife, Gloria, attended the “Easy Rider” premiere and bonded in their support of animal rights. Richard Nixon? Stewart campaigned for him. Paul Lynde? Well, uh, Stewart, like the rest of us, watched him on “Hollywood Squares.”

Sometimes it’s a stretch to work in the old favorites.

Little wisely sets up the show with a stamp of approval from Stewart himself: old TV clips of the two, with young Little in his funky bowl haircut teaching Stewart how to imitate himself, and Stewart telling Little, “You keep people like me working.” (Funny how it ended up the other way around.)

The Stewart voice is still so dead-on you quickly accept it as a narrative base line, as Little paces the small stage of the Shimmer Cabaret decorated with living room furniture.

But since the actor lived a straight-arrow life (he was married to Gloria for 45 years), his life was more in his work, and Little needs to find more ways to liven up the Wikipedia-like chronology.

Quick references to classic films such as “Harvey” or “It’s a Wonderful Life” make you want to linger on them, perhaps in the way Frank Gorshin would do a serious take on Richard Burton in “Camelot,” or Danny Gans would deliver the Al Pacino “Scent of a Woman” monologue verbatim.

But who knows what could happen if this show extends beyond July 4? Little tells the audience at the end that he’s still working on it, and that “you can always make it better.”

Perhaps you can teach an old impressionist new tricks.

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