OKLAHOMA CITY — Say “one-man show” and anyone is likely to imagine a lone, verbose figure on stage recounting stories and yarns and opinionated musings from across their life and mind like any one of a million would-be Mark Twains.
What you probably don’t imagine is a ceaselessly energetic, lightning-fast-paced, often harrowing live-action memoir told as much through light, sound, and meticulous choreography as through one man’s speech.
That’s exactly what you get with “SMALL,” the touring Off-Broadway success story running through February 25th at Lyric Theatre in the Plaza.
Conceived, written, performed, and lived by dancer/actor/former jockey Robert Montano, “SMALL” is that different kind of one-man show that utilizes all the urgency and imaginative possibility of stage performance to pull the audience along through his life, rather than just telling his story under a spotlight.
Montano is an accomplished Broadway and film dancer and actor (and occasional leading man) with appearances in “Cats,” “On the Town,” Kiss of the Spiderwoman,” and even the Oscar-winning film version of “Chicago.”
But before all of that, as a teenager, Montano lived a short stint as a professional competitive horse jockey, following an all-encompassing childhood obsession with the sport spurred by the shame and bullying he endured for his small stature and – at the time – weak figure.
A chance exposure at a young age to the command and respect enjoyed by the also slight-bodied jockeys at New York’s Belmont Raceway was Montano’s first indication that even someone so small could be a giant.
He read and studied and prayed and just as he finally began to realize his dream and get his feet into the jockey world, he crashed into the natural growth of puberty, gradually inching past the required smallness necessary to be a successful horse racer.
And so began a period of increasingly troubling body issues, with Montano waging a war on weight, food cravings, and “the monster,” the name the jockeys gave to the weigh-in scale that would determine if they were small enough to race on any given day.
It would be easy to tell the story as a sad cautionary tale, somber and dire in the darkest moments and self-congratulatory in its resolutions, but Montano doesn’t run that easy line.
“SMALL” is all about pace and rhythm and excitement. The lowest, most tragic beats of bodily abuse and disorder are wrapped up into the suspense and enthusiasm of the races. Montano builds and boils the tension like a horror story, with every time-stopping moment of competition on the track its own climactic release.
And he doesn’t do it alone.
“SMALL” is a one-man show, yes, and Montano is alone on stage, but he shares the show’s success with lighting designers Jamie Roderick and Fabian Garcia, sound designers Brian Ronan and Corey Ray, stage manager Karen Scheifer, and of course director Jessi D. Hill.
The story is told as much with split-second lighting shifts, muffled racetrack announcements, and turn-on-a-dime music cues as it is with Montano’s words, and all the elements mesh beautifully into one big engrossing stage production that just so happens to only star a single lone actor.
Because “SMALL” is absolutely an ensemble cast of characters. It’s just that Montano plays them all simultaneously.
From the exaggerated caricatures of trashy, Southern stable hands, British fancies, pretentious NYC dance instructors, and even his own Puerto Rican mother to the delicately framed sympathies of his artist father and the power and stature of his jockey idol, Robert Pineda, Montano shifts effortlessly into each persona.
But it’s the physicality of Montano’s performance – not just the various voices and personalities – that sets “SMALL” apart in the one-man show world.
As a trained, multidisciplinary dancer of the highest level, he brings a sense of strictly conceptualized choreography to every moment of the show. The high-energy horse races and life-threatening weight-loss benders are obvious showcases for movement and fluidity, but he brings that same dancer’s physicality to his most subtle and swift transitions between characters or even just his natural gait and movements across the stage.
The exact same show with the same staging and movements, but with all the words removed, could conceivably still work as a showcase of modern dance or even a narrative, wordless, one-man ballet.
And that’s because dance is clearly the central preoccupation of Montano’s life.
When, late in the play, he finally and inevitably rediscovers the love of dance that he’d developed as a child, it feels a bit like an afterthought or an epilogue to a story that felt so decidedly about horse racing and jockey culture. The transition from racing to dance in the narrative at first feels almost like a non-sequitur.
But that’s only because the story was never actually about horse racing any more than it was about dancing.
“SMALL” – at its core and in its spirit – is about a person’s relationship with their own body.
From the idealization of the power and the musculature of the horses to the visceral body horror of the abuse and drug use that Montano put himself through, it’s all about bodies, about the things they can do, and about the things we can do to them.
Through horse racing, Montano learned rhythm, pace, and timing, the most important elements of dance. But he also learned how to control and how to communicate with a body in motion.
And maybe that’s all that dancing really is.
“SMALL” is running on stage at Lyric Theatre in the Plaza now through February 25th.
For showtimes, tickets, and more information, including warnings for adult themes such as language, drug use, and sexuality, visit lyrictheatreokc.com.
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
