Appreciation

He could nosh on a peach with the best of them, imaginary juices dripping from his chin. He was an incredible monkey and an even better rooster, and of course nobody could blow up a balloon – or appear to – like Tony Montanaro.

Now, the more than 1,000 students who learned the craft of mime and improvisation from the world-famous performer and teacher will have to carry on his legacy. Montanaro, 75, died last Friday of stomach cancer at his home in Casco.

In the 1950s he’d been a student of mime legends Marcel Marceau and Etienne Decroux in France, but that training isn’t what made Tony Montanaro special.

The magic was there to begin with, at least as early as a college role in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” when as a young actor he thought of letting a piece of an imaginary doughnut fall into his cup of coffee.

“And a hundred people burst out laughing,” he recalled during an interview nearly two years ago. His audience – from viewers of toothpaste commercials in Italy to mime fans in Germany to fourth-graders in small Maine schools – continued to laugh for more than a half-century.

I’d known of the mime-juggler-teacher who founded Celebration Barn in South Paris, but really started to pay attention after hearing about him from two of my favorite performers, Randy Judkins and Brad Leavitt, after their performances at Newburgh Elementary School in the mid-1980s.

Soon after, Montanaro did a show at the University of Maine, and I sat as near the stage as I could get, enchanted. Fifteen years later, having read his book, “Mime Spoken Here,” I sat up close again at Phyzgig in Portland, amazed by the soccer game with strobelike effects he enacted with his wife, Karen Hurll-Montanaro. All the while, I kept one eye on the performers in the audience and how they studied the pair.

The mimes and performers who’ve learned from Montanaro are legion, among them Jackie Reifer and John Saccone, Fritz Grobe and Morten Hansen, Fred Garbo of the Inflatable Theatre Company, Jackson Gillman and performers from the Big Apple Circus.

They also include dancers such as Joffrey-trained Hurll-Montanaro, singers, actors, comedians and teachers – and the countless children he’s led in school programs. It’s no wonder that “Mime Spoken Here” is not only a book, but a pair of videos.

Montanaro continued to teach at Celebration Barn years after he sold the theater program, and also taught students at the studios he and his wife built at Montanaro-Hurll Retreat in Casco.

And I don’t mean he watched the construction. Montanaro himself put up sheetrock, framed doors and pounded lots of nails – for real.

And boy, could he teach. How many tentative improvisers must have wondered whether they could get up on his empty stage, until their mentor said in a way that made them believe, “Something will occur to you.”

It seemed, too, that Montanaro believed – like no one has before or since – that he could teach an uncoordinated interviewer how to walk safely on an icy path between his home and studio. His boundless energy bridled only slightly that day in early 2001; he spoke confidently about the possibilities of placing one’s weight over the feet – not behind or in front of them – and showed just how it’s done.

Nobody applauded, but it was a great moment, a bit of time with one of the greats.

Jackie Reifer, who has performed with John Saccone on the bill with Tony Montanaro countless times, summed it up after the Phyzgig show:

“His spotlight is just so big -his glow, that when you’re in it, it’s an amazing experience.”

Tony Montanaro is survived by his wife, eight children, nine grandchildren and one brother. Details of a public memorial scheduled for Jan. 31 in Portland will be posted at www.mimetheatre.com.