Jack Brooks (director/actor/broadcaster)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jack Brooks (1935-1984) was a popular San Francisco Bay Area director and actor who hosted his own Saturday morning talk show on KGO Radio in San Francisco, California during the early 1980s. He also reviewed movies and local productions for KGO. He was in the nationally touring company of the Broadway musical Kismet in 1957, playing Hajj. He directed a number of local productions and concluded his career, in the summer of 1983, by directing the Capuchino Community Theatre production of Kismet, at Capuchino High School in San Bruno, California. Brooks had very high standards and sought professional performances from the community performers. Lavish sets and costumes dominated the colorful production. Singer Cleo Laine and her conductor husband, John Dankworth, attended one of the performances and enjoyed it.
He was again hired by CCT in 1984 to direct their next summer production, Of Thee I Sing by George and Ira Gershwin. He joined board members at a College of Marin production of the musical and was involved in the initial planning of the CCT production, including the design of the unit set. Brooks also made arrangements with Sigmund Stern Grove in San Francisco, California to give a performance of the musical satire on the eve of the Democratic National Convention at the Moscone Convention Center. Unfortunately, the morning of auditions in June, Brooks suffered a heart attack while doing his KGO broadcast and was immediately hospitalized; he suffered another heart attack at the hospital and died that night.
The Capuchino Community Theatre production of Of Thee I Sing went ahead that summer. The board hastily auditioned directors and chose Simon Levy, one of the directors of San Francisco's musical review Beach Blanket Babylon. The Stern Grove performance, with a professional orchestra, attracted 20,000 persons and was acclaimed by both San Francisco daily newspapers and a visiting critic from the London Times. The production was, of course, dedicated to the memory of Jack Brooks, whose unit set and original ideas were utilized.
[edit] Sources
- Capuchino Community Theatre website
- Eyewitness accounts
