It's Oscar time, sports fans, and once again this diehard film freak is having a tough go trying to care about which of the 10 nominees is named Best Picture on the night of March 27. Certainly, Belfast is a fine piece of work, Penelope Cruz makes the heart break in Parallel Mothers, and Dune, Licorice Pizza, and Nightmare Alley are entertaining in their own peculiar ways. But Don't Look Up is apocalypse played for laughs (Dr. Strangelove it ain't), and Drive My Car should have been an HBO mini-series.
Sorry to say, the only Best Picture nominee with a horse in the cast is The Power of the Dog, a cowpoke flick made in New Zealand pretending to be Montana. The lead character, a repressed gay rancher with a decidedly sadistic streak, seems to have a more intimate relationship with his buffalo-hide chaps than he does with any of his livestock, which was intriguing. But the movie lost this viewer, at least in sympathy, at the 33-minute mark when our hero became enraged by the engagement of his brother to a woman—a woman!—and started slapping his horse around with a rub rag. After that, the castration of a bull was gravy.
So much for the silver screen. At times like these it's best to turn for refuge to the stage, and specifically to a one-man show on the rise in New York called "Small," written and starring the veteran Broadway dancer and film actor Robert Montano. If wishes were horses, sooner than later there will be an opportunity to see "Small" at an off-Broadway theatre and beyond, but for now it is found at the Penguin Rep Theatre in Stony Point, N.Y., up there in the Hudson River Valley.
Montano's career as an actor includes featured roles in The Yards with Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron and on TV in "Sex in the City," "NCIS: New Orleans," "Blue Bloods," and "City on a Hill," as well as recurring roles in vintage soaps like "As the World Turns" and "One Life to Live." On the stage, Montano has danced with Chita Rivera in "Kiss of the Spider Woman" and played Mr. Mistoffelees in "Cats" on Broadway. And, speaking of the Oscars, he was one of the guys writhing alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones in the "All That Jazz" production number from 2002 Best Picture winner Chicago.
Did I mention Montano also was a jockey? It was just for the blink of an eye, the equivalent of a ballplayer getting a cup of coffee in the majors, but the experience was imprinted upon Montano so deeply that his creation of "Small" is essentially a theatrical synthesis of the years spent longing for something he was denied and his cultivation of an alternate career.
"Small" is also a tribute to the jockey's profession, the seduction of which hit the teenage Montano like a thunderbolt the day his mother took the kid from Queens for the first time to Belmont Park.
"I was bullied because of my size as a kid," Montano said. "When I saw the jockeys come out, and there was kind of a hush come over the people, I wondered what that was. My mother said, 'That's respect.' I fell in love with the idea of these little men retaining that respect on these massive animals."
Montano met jockey Roberto Pineda and they clicked. Pineda ushered the kid to the backstretch and aboard horses, but by the time Montano turned 16 his growth rate had accelerated and he was no longer the bullied shrimp of his junior high school days.
Nevertheless, Montano did all the terrible things to reduce himself into the white pants and boots of a professional jockey. On March 2, 1977, six weeks shy of his 17th birthday, apprentice Robert Montano made his professional debut at Aqueduct Racetrack aboard a 5-year-old gelding named Winter Walk, with Pineda alongside on the pony.
"And I rode with three fractured ribs, because that morning I was in a bad spill," Montano said.
Within the year, wrung out from reducing, Montano hung up those white pants, kept growing, and went on to become an accomplished exercise rider for well-regarded New York-based trainers. That's when a teenager named Richie Migliore, apprentice to trainer Steve DiMauro at the time, took notice.
"He was always with the gleaming boots, the jeans that felt just right on the boot leg," Migliore recalled. "He'd be riding down the path, give me a nod or a wink, and I'd be like, 'Man, that's so cool. That guy noticed me.' There was something about him; you knew he had something more going on."
Migliore was right. While working at the track, Montano began training for a career in show biz, topping out at 5-9 and muscled like the Broadway dancer he would become. The arc of that amazing journey, from starstruck young jockey wannabe to a long and satisfying run as an accomplished performing artist, lends "Small" its reason for being.
"When you're acting, you strive for immediacy, the organic of that first feel," Montano said this week as he prepared for the show's final performances in Stony Point. "But when you're on a racehorse you're constantly in that place, because you have no choice. You are totally in that moment, because literally anything can happen. When I was on a horse I always felt high voltage, excited and ready, and singular. Friends would ask me, 'What is it better than?' I'd say it sounds crazy, but it's better than sex."
When Montano left the track, Migliore lost touch. They reconnected years later when the jock competed for a season in California while Montano was working in L.A., and they have remained close since. Now a racing broadcaster, Migliore—he of the 4,450 winners—encouraged Montano as he developed "Small." Migliore was in the audience last weekend at the Penguin Rep Theatre.
"Outside the industry, people see jockeys as either undersized people or athletes who are rich and famous," Migliore said. "They never see the adversity just to get to the point to ride at all, never mind being successful, and then having longevity.
"What struck me watching 'Small' was wondering if people truly realize how deep you go into yourself to do something that's just so hard, and for a lot of people just not natural," Migliore said. "But you're willing to do it anyway—risk your health, to starve, your life and limb. It's amazing to me just how far the human spirit will go to try to do something so difficult, and how tough it is to let go."
Montano was schooled early in the tragic side of racing. His right shoulder bears the tattooed name of his favorite racehorse—Ruffian—and in May of 1978 Pineda, his friend and mentor, was killed in a three-horse accident at Pimlico Race Course.
However, it was in the winter of 2010, after many years of success on stage and screen, that the message Montano was trying to convey in earlier versions of "Small" became crystalized. He was standing at the foot of Migliore's hospital bed, after the jockey had suffered a broken neck for the second time in his stellar career.
"Richie said it didn't matter if you rode in just a few races like I did, or the 30,000 he rode," Montano said. "He said he finally understood how I felt, because now he knew he'd never get to ride again."
In "Small," Montano rides again.
