Now that she’s stopped modeling, former Sports Illustrated Swimsuit star Brooklyn Decker is posing for the cameras more than ever:Who better to write and direct a tribute to the stars of Hollywood’s golden age than someone who brushed elbows with those stars?
Longtime Fort Wayne Youtheatre director and onetime Broadway and radio actor Harvey Cocks is just the man for just that job.
He will present “Hollywood Cavalcade,” a fund- raiser for Fort Wayne Youtheatre, on Saturday night at Arts United Center.
Cocks, 85, describes “Hollywood Cavalcade” as “31 actors playing 71 parts.”
Some of the more notable pairings include Indiana’s NewsCenter anchor Melissa Long playing Carmen Miranda; local vocal instructor Amy Baxter playing Mae West; WXKE-FM Rock 104 disc jockey Leslie Stone as gossip columnist Hedda Hopper; actor/director Becky Niccum as Charlie Chaplin; and Brad Beauchamp and Larry Bower assaying roles they have played for years at corporate functions: Bud Abbott and Lou Costello.
“Hollywood Cavalcade” looks to have “more stars than can be seen in the heavens,” to quote an old MGM motto, as long as your definition of a star doesn’t start at Robert Pattinson and end at Taylor Lautner, both “Twilight” movie actors.
Groucho Marx, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, Fred Astaire, Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Shirley Temple, James Cagney, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, the Andrews Sisters, Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart are some of the legendary performers who will be impersonated by area actors.
This is one of the few shows for which Cocks didn’t really have to conduct auditions, he says.
“Most of the people called me and said ‘we want to be in this,’ ” he says. “This show brought out the cream of the crop of local talent.”
The costumes for “Hollywood Cavalcade” were donated by the Civic Theatre, Cocks says, and the use of the stage by Arts United.
“Theater people have really rallied around this,” Cocks says.
“Hollywood Cavalcade” is meant to evoke two series of films made from the late ’20s to the late ’30s under the “Broadway Melody” and “Big Broadcast” rubrics.
They were revues that featured the hottest singers, dancers, comedians and radio stars of the moment.
Few of those stars are still around, but their fame lingers.
“They were our royalty,” Cocks says.
Still, some of the younger actors in the show had to be schooled in the particulars of their characters.
They couldn’t have found a better teacher than Cocks, who has a seemingly endless supply of first-person reminiscences about many of those stars.
Cocks says the recession has been particularly tough on fine-arts groups such as Youtheatre. Because of limitations placed on field trips by Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett, Cocks says, school-related business was way down this past season.
But Youtheatre isn’t going anywhere, he insists.
“We’re OK,” he says. “Everybody’s had to pay the piper.”
