PATRICK'S PEOPLE: Rich Little is a well voiced performer

The voices of actor Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and a host of other celebrities will fill Pittsburg Memorial Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. June 23."

They will all issue from the throat of one man, impressionist Rich Little, nicknamed the  “Man of a Thousand Voices.”

“I do 38 different people during the course of ‘Jimmy Stewart and Friends’,” Little said during a recent telephone interview from Las Vegas.

He has been doing the Stewart show at the Las Vegas at the LVH (formerly the Las Vegas Hilton), and its run there was recently extended to July 4.

“This is a show I’ve been working on for three years and I work on it every day, brushing it up and polishing it,” Little said. “My plan is to take it to Broadway.”

He said that the spent a lot of time with Stewart and knew him quite well. For that matter, he knew Nixon, entertained at both of Reagan’s inaugurations, and is on good terms with both Bush presidents.

“I’ve just known more and spent more time at the White House with Republican presidents,” Little said. “Reagan was a wonderful man. He said that he wanted me to run for president and just keep talking in his voice. I said, ‘Mr. President, I’m a Canadian, so  I can’t run for president of the United States’.”

He’s not really sorry about that, either.

“I think the presidency is a non-winning job,” Little said, adding that he has no interest in ever running for any political office himself.

Still, he does follow the political scene and has worked up  an impersonation of President Barack Obama.

“I do a few Obama references for laughs, but Jimmy Stewart never knew Obama so it would be hard to work him into the show,” Little said. “Right now I’m working on Mitt Romney. This should be an interesting year politically. I have dual Canadian-U.S. citizenship so I can vote.”

He also has impressions of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and spent most of 2003 touring the country  with his show “The Presidents.”

Little is a fan of classic movies and enjoys doing impressions of actors such as  his childhood hero Alan Ladd,  Lionel Barrymore and Cary Grant. Younger audiences may not recognize a lot of these people, but Little said they usually respond well to his shows anyway.

“I see a lot of very young kids,” he said. “Sometimes they don’t know any of the people I’m doing, but they still laugh because the jokes are funny.”

He has added more contemporary actors to his repertoire,  including Clint Eastwood, but rejected a recent joking suggestion that he add a Justin Bieber  impersonation to the line-up.

“Impossible,” Little said. “Jimmy  Stewart never knew Justin Bieber.”

He discovered his talent for impersonation when he was 12, when he began answering his teachers back in their own voices He worked shows and clubs in Canada and the United States, and had a big break when his friend, the singer Mel Torme, was on the musical team of Judy Garland’s CBS TV show. He asked Little to make an audition tape for the show, Garland loved it and he was signed to the show.

He followed that with numerous appearances on TV variety shows, including the Ed Sullivan Show, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and the Julie Andrews Show. He  was also a guest host on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show 12 times, and portrayed Carson in the movie “The Late Shift” on HBO.

“You know, Jimmy Stewart and Carson were very close,” Little said.  “Jimmy would go on the Tonight Show and do poems.”

He enjoys working in Las Vegas, but said he is looking forward to performing in Pittsburg.

“It’s even better on the road,” Little said. “Tourists may see six shows in three days in Vegas and they’re getting a little tired. When I take the show to a city, the reaction seems to be better.”

Tickets may be purchased at the Pittsburg Memorial Auditorium box office, by calling 231-7827 or online. Cost is $25 for main floor and lower balcony seats and $20 for remaining balcony seats.