[Pipe and Drape theme plays.]
STEPHEN FALA: I’m Stephen Fala, and you’re listening to Pipe and Drape, the only podcast that spotlights the creative minds behind the theatre for young audiences industry. Every two weeks I sit down with a theatre professional to hear their stories about the audition, rehearsal, and development process of theatre for young audiences. Each of them have bridged the path from youth to adulthood while living in worlds created for children. My guests have mounted shows small enough to fit in a minivan to productions so big they travel by caravan. You can join the conversation by emailing PipeAndDrapeStories@gmail.com or messaging @PipeAndDrapeStories on Instagram. This is Episode 3 of Pipe and Drape; Target has put out its Back-to-School campaign, which means it is time to discuss one of the first things that comes to mind when one hears “school assembly”: anti-bullying plays. Theatre or role-play are often hand-in-hand with education when it comes time for schools to address issues such as bullying. My guest shares his story from behind the pipe and drape setting of several plays used to combat bullying in schools in New York State. These plays have had a major impact on their audiences, and for this Long Island native, the experience of creating and performing these pieces was a huge stepping stone on his path to adulthood. Thank you for listening with me today.
S: Today’s guest is Bobby Montaniz. If you have been to Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia between October and April of the past few years, there's a chance that you've seen Bobby and a number of festive shows including Scrooge No More where he originated the role of Fezziwig. And for all of my Long Island listeners, you have definitely seen him dominating the Long Island theater scene at the John W. Engeman Theater, Theatre Three, Smithtown Center for the Performing Arts, and the Merrick Theatre. Most recently, Bobby was aboard the Disney Magic hanging out with Hook Hand at Rapunzel’s Royal Table. He and I met in his kitchen at a hotel in Toronto where he had me laughing uncontrollably for forty-five minutes. And today he is joining me from his home in Long Island, where we will discuss his experience performing anti-bullying pieces in schools all over his homeland. Bobby, welcome.
BOBBY MONTANIZ: Hi, Steve.
S: You were born and raised in Long Island. Is that correct?
B: I sure was, Lindenhurst, New York, Long Island.
S: What’s your favorite part about being a Long Islander?
B: Well, when I was growing up, I was really, really close with all my cousins on my mom's side of the family, and everyone lived within five minutes of each other. It was that kind of thing where you hang out with your cousins, and they're your friends, and people are like, ‘What? My cousins live in Texas and I never see them.’ For such a big area, it’s such a close, small community no matter what your quote/unquote “community” is. And then once I started doing theatre, it became kind of a, ‘Oh, do you know this person? They're looking for someone to do this show, or you're doing the show with someone who is choreographing a show at this theatre,’ so you kind of get bounced around. And the biggest thing about living on Long Island is it's a good sense of camaraderie, especially within the theatre community. And also, I feel like being from Long Island, you have like an unwarranted sense of confidence. I think that's anyone who's a native New Yorker, though.
S: Is that confidence what brought you into the world of the performing arts?
B: When I'm onstage, I feel that I am very confident, I know what I'm doing, I'm in control of what I'm doing and my body and my comedy and everything that's going on. But I am the worst auditioner because I have horrible audition anxiety. Everywhere that I need the confidence, it's not there. But once I'm in the rehearsal room or on stage, I definitely find it there. It's so weird, because when I was growing up, I played sports. All my entire family played sports. Everyone played hockey, lacrosse, soccer, baseball, and I played baseball and soccer until I was maybe in sixth grade. And then I was like, ‘I hate this. I'm gonna do theatre,’ then I kind of forged my own path for myself instead of just doing sports because that's what everyone else did. I tried out for my middle school production of Beauty and the Beast that was 100% illegal. They would play the Broadway recording and we would just sing with it. That was the show.
S: Did your school offer acting classes or other opportunities for you to perform for credits?
B: In high school, there was drama class and thespian club; that was really about it. You could do like the school musical and the school play in high school, but that wasn't until high school. So like in middle school, you could just do like illegal productions of Beauty and the Beast.
S: Did you have exposure to theater outside of school, being in Long Island?
B: Well, I actually had never seen a show on Long Island, other than being in middle school and like a touring show coming to the middle school to do a show there. That was my only exposure within school. But my parents took me to see Grease on Broadway in 1996 [1997], the revival that was on. Rizzo was played by Xena Warrior Princess. Lucy Lawless.
S: [World rocked.] What?!
B: Yep, they took me to that. I saw Lion King when I was in fifth grade, but I remember going to see Little Shop, the revival with Hunter Foster and Carrie Butler when I was, I think in middle school, and that was the first time that I was like, ‘Is that a job? Like people do this for work?’ And it kind of got me on the path of like, ‘Oh, this could be like…I could…that could be my job. Maybe that's what I want to do.’ All throughout high school I thought I was going to be a history teacher. I love global and ancient history, that whole kind of early, early history like ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Rome, Greece, I just I found it so fascinating. And in senior year, I was like, ‘Maybe I don't want to do that. Maybe I don't want to be a teacher,’ and I started thinking about it. By the time I kind of came to that conclusion my guidance counselor, she was like, ‘Well, you would have had to have auditioned a year ago. And I don't know how to go about that now,’ and I was like, ‘Okay,’ so I got into a community college in Manhattan. I went there for two semesters for my freshman year. In my mind, I was like, ‘Well, I'm gonna be in the city so maybe I'll audition for stuff.’ I had no clue what I was doing. None. It wound up that I had to take science and math and I was like, ‘I hate this, I don't want to do this. I don't want to take these classes again.’ So then I dropped out of that school and then I went to Nassau Community College, which is on Long Island. And I was like, ‘Yeah, I'll take like a theater class,’ and it was horrible and I just wouldn't go because I was unhappy. And it was that year that I started looking into community theater. So I got cast in this production of Sweeney Todd. And then immediately, this theatre on Long Island was like, ‘We're gonna put you in children's theater, and you're gonna do this show, you're gonna do the summer show,’ and it just kind of absorbed me in, and I wound up not going back to school. I never went to college. I say that I went to the School of Hard Knocks because from 2010 until 2014, I was doing anywhere from three to six shows at a time. I would be in a mainstage show, a children's theater show, and an ed. rep show, and then rehearsing another three. When I say I was getting paid, it was like $10, a show, no rehearsal pay. And I was working at a Dunkin’ Donuts at the time.
S: That’s amazing how busy you were able to be and learning so much by doing it, which I think is the best way to learn.
B: I would agree with that. And I think doing it is… I'm a hands-on learner, and acquiring skills like doing hard choreo or, you know… It’s not the same as taking a dance class, but there is something about learning hands-on.
S: Part of your Long Island theatre experience was educating students in schools through theatre and performance. How did you get into this job where you are touring around multiple anti-bullying shows to elementary through high school students?
B: Kind of the same way that I got involved with that theatre to begin with. People just get your contact information and they're like, ‘Hey, we're doing this show. Do you want to come down?’ And it was like, ‘Sure.’ So I wound up doing a mainstage show at this theatre. Same thing, you know, you're doing the mainstage show, and they're like, ‘Hey, we're doing the children's theater show, are you available?’ and it's like, ‘Yeah,’ and then you kind of do like…it just snowballs. And then I was asked to participate in the show that was geared towards seventh grade to twelfth grade playing the bullied, like the victim. And then in that year, there was a creation of a secondary show geared towards kindergarten to third grade. So I was in the show that was already existing about late middle to high school, and then involved in the creation and premiere of this one about elementary school.
S: What was it like creating a show for that age group, tackling this subject?
B: You know, I always find that like with children's theatre, especially TYA stuff, a lot of the shows that center around…that have like an underlying theme of ‘it's not okay to bully’ or like, ‘be who you are!’: it's usually late twenty to mid-thirty year olds pretending to be children. You just kind of have to get over the silliness of that, because it's something important to impart on children. Especially because I remember doing the high school one, performing it while we were creating the younger kids one, and watch, like, you can look out and see that these kids were slumped down, they didn't care, they were talking to each other, they were laughing at us. It just it got to a point where it's lost on them. The idea of doing it for kids who are younger…kids are impressionable. If they're seeing these adults say, ‘It's not cool to do that,’ and, ‘You shouldn't do that,’ you know, it hopefully it has a longer lasting impression on them than it does people who are kind of established in their hierarchy already. That bullying or teasing or any of that is kind of established as like, ‘Yeah, no, this happens already. Like we're not going to stop now just because these thirty-year-olds are telling us not to.’ So creating it was really, really cute and really, really fun. It felt really cool to be a part of something like that. It was basically like just learning a new show. The only difference was that there were just changes made all the time. It'd be like, ‘We're just gonna cut this page entirely, just transition from that to that.’ And then it was with all of my really, really good friends. And I can sit with any of them and we can talk about that and it's like it was yesterday, and we just laughed our heads of just thinking about it. And it was, it's a really cute show, and they still tour it today. Being a part of creating something like that is really cool. And I went on to create, like be in the original casts for one or two more things after that. So it kind of introduced me to that world of like, ‘Oh, this is creative. This is like putting A to B to C together.’
S: Can you take us through a day in the life: morning, wake up, and then do your job, and then go to bed at night?
B: During that time of my life I was managing a Dunkin’ Donuts. That included me opening the store. So I would be there at 4AM, and then when my second would come in, I would get ready to leave to drive somewhere on Long Island that was often anywhere from five to forty-five minutes away to get there for 8:30 call time. If our call was 8:30, the stage manager would usually get there around 8/8:15 to check in. They would go to the front desk like, ‘Hey, we're here to do the show.’ And then they would normally tell you where to park and then open a backdoor so that you could pull the van up. So then they would start getting some stuff out. But then by the time the actors got there, that process would be done. And then you would go to the auditorium or like the cafeteria/the cafegymnatorium/wherever we were performing that day (that old chestnut where like, it's this room that's big and it has lunch tables in it, but there's a stage and a piano for some reason?), and then we would go to the back door where the van was and everyone would take out these set pieces, and it was usually just a bare stage with a general light wash. For the middle to high school one, it was lockers, each character had a locker, and it was props or costume pieces or like, ‘In this scene, I'm wearing this hat so I’m, this person.’ But then with the younger one, there was these like yellow benches. Sometimes they were benches. If you turn them upright and together and then put a plug on top of it, it was like a table. It was very, very resourceful, very smart. I'm taking the set pieces out, setting it up on stage, doing the show, doing like a Q&A, and then packing up the van and usually going back to work finish working and then I would go do a mainstage rehearsal after that, and then go home, go to sleep and do it the next day. I think I would get home around like 11 and then have to be up by like 3:30 to go to Dunkin’ Donuts. I don't know how I did. I really don’t.
S: In addition to doing the show and the talkback whilst managing a Dunkin’ Donuts, did you have any additional duties?
B: We had to do our own laundry, we had to bring our own costumes to and from. It was established for the one show like, ‘Okay, this is the color you wear. Go get this color.’
S: What were some things out of the ordinary that occurred with this tour.
B: What was really cool was with both programs: there were packets given that were like, ‘Let's reflect on the show, let's talk about it. When they did this: what kind of bullying was that? Was that cyber bullying? Was it physical bullying?’ and it was kind of just like, ‘Let's reaffirm what they just watched,’ which I thought was pretty cool. And that was given through the theatre as well.
S: Did you have any kids with snarky questions, especially dealing with an older age group where they're just trying to impress their friends by saying something during a talkback?
B: Seventh to ninth grade kids are so snarky and so rude. They would raise their hands and it was…and you could tell, you could always tell which little punk was gonna be like, ‘Yeah, like, like, do you do this because you're gay?’ You know, right away we'd be like, ‘Well actually, that's bullying, and you're kind of proving our point up here. And if you have nothing else to say, then we're gonna move on to someone else. And just know that you just kind of proved their point and why your school needs this show right now.’ The teachers would just be like, gobsmacked. And we would be like, ‘Do you want to handle that? Because we'll handle it, like we're about to…we’re gonna leave in two minutes, we're done. So we can lay the law down, or you can do it.’ And there would be times that the teachers would like jump into it. And other times where they would be too busy grading their papers or on their phones. And there would be times that we would go back and we would say, 'We don't want to go back to that school. They were horrible.’ And you know, there would be some (to my understanding) some conversation of like, ‘Your kids, were rude to the actors, and we're not going to have that. We’re not going to have them come there to do this for them to just be disrespected. Because that's not right.’ There are other schools who would take that message in better and appreciate it that were not getting it because they booked that day.
S: Are there any other ways that this experience propelled you forward as an actor, or even just as a young adult in the theatre industry?
B: I always found that, especially with children's theatre, or theatre in general, (but like specifically this kind of stuff) was having to be self-reliant. You might have to do a four piece suit change in thirty seconds, and you don't have a dresser, you have to figure it out yourself. What can you do to make it work for you? And sometimes you can't rely on people to be there. Sometimes it's A: not in the budget, B: while you might have a four piece to change there could be a girl who has a complete ballgown change and the one dresser needs to be there. You have to be resourceful. Sometimes props aren't provided. And it's like, ‘Well, I have this old notebook that I can cut pages out of and color them green, and now they're dollars.’ And also it gave me a lot of endurance, I think, that mostly came from being sleep deprived and learning how to function on that kind of schedule. When I do theme park stuff, when they're like, ‘Okay, we have six shows today. And we have six shows tomorrow. And then we have ten more days of six shows,’ I'm like, 'Yeah, okay, I got it.’
S: It’s interesting, like, at least I’ve witnessed, the different way people in different theaters will handle exhaustion or what they feel is enough work or even what they think is good work that they're doing.
B: That’s a really good point. I have always found that in building up the endurance to do, whether it's an eight show week or a six show day at a theme park or whatever like six show cruises on the Magic like we did, I've always found that, for me, came from doing children's theater, and that humble beginnings kind of thing where it's you and a group of five to six other people putting on a show. And sometimes it's bare bones, it's pipe and drape kind of stuff. You establish like, ‘This is what we're doing.’ I mean, everyone has to think about it: the first time any performer probably saw acting or a show, it was probably the very thing that I'm describing, or something TYA where your parents took you to some random theatre, where they're doing this weird version of Beauty and the Beast. And it’s in those moments where it's most important because kids are sponges and you don't know who's out there that you could be inspiring.
S: Bobby, how can our listeners find you?
B: They can find me on social media, mostly just Instagram @bobbymontaniz. That is my, you know, it's my full name.
S: Excellent. Well, Bobby, thank you for speaking with me today.
B: Thank you, Steve.
S: Be sure to check out Bobby’s profile to see where his pipe and drape story has taken him.
[Pipe and Drape theme plays.]
You can join the conversation about theatre for young audiences and find more Pipe and Drape content including photos, quotes, and TYA news on Instagram @PipeAndDrapeStories. And please be sure to rate and review Pipe and Drape wherever you listen to podcasts! Each star given or review submitted helps future listeners to find the show. Be sure to tune in every other Tuesday to hear theatre for young audiences creatives share their pipe and drape stories. Pipe and Drape is created and hosted by Stephen Fala and distributed by Anchor. Artwork for Pipe and Drape was created by Stephen Gordon and music was composed by Stephen Fala. Thank you for listening with me today.
B: [Blows nose.] You're welcome.
INSTAGRAM: @bobbymontaniz
INSTAGRAM: @PipeAndDrapeStories
EMAIL: PipeAndDrapeStories@gmail.com
Host: Stephen Fala
Artwork: Stephen Gordon
