I'm a mime, and as a mime, I want to, on a bare stage in space, show that I'm mad.
Who's a miracle to me, can be anything, can be anybody.
My name is Tony Montanaro.
I've been doing mime improvisation and acting in theater for about 40 years now.
To me, mime really is physical eloquence.
It's the eloquence of the body.
And there was a human element to all of his work, and it was the fact that he was such
a good person, that his performances were so superb.
The audience didn't come to see someone touching a wall that wasn't there.
They came to see him do that.
What rocked me was, this was not a guy doing a performance.
This was a person who was living and breathing what he was doing on the stage.
There simply was no separation.
He had this deep still place, I think, within himself, from which he could etch his mime
so intensely.
I think he was a wonderful performer.
I enjoyed very much performing with him.
I thought that he was very pure in his approach to what he did, that is to say, he had a
kind of vision of something that he was trying to do.
My name is Tony Montanaro, Italian name.
Born in South Jersey, went to school, went to college, Rutgers, graduated from Columbia,
studied drama, went to Europe, had a scholarship to study mime with Marceau.
I think this is why I was very touched when you asked me to speak about Tony Montanaro,
because really he was lyrical too, comical, he could be tragic too, but he went in another
direction.
He never copied Marceau after.
He was his own director.
Tony was very special, I'd admit, he had a sense, a deep sense for comedy, because I
think he was also of Italian origin maybe.
And of course, he liked the comedia dell'arte, he liked Chaplin, he liked all the people
I liked.
