Richard Bermudez as Dr. Henry Jekyll, the character's better half.                      Karli Cadel Photography

            It takes nearly an hour and a half for Mr. Hyde to show his murderous self, but when he does in San Diego Musical Theatre’s graphic production of “Jekyll & Hyde the Musical,” look out. Put it this way  -- Jason Voorhees would be admiring.
            Stage blood is spilled and splattered liberally, while one particular killing is gasp-worthy. I come to praise SDMT’s production, not to bury it, for these visceral effects, without which this Frank Wildhorn (music)/Leslie Bricusse (book and lyrics) show would be stylishly costumed and somewhere between melodramatic and lurid – no more.
            This staging has something else remarkably going for it: a balls-out performance in the schizophrenic lead role by Richard Bermudez. Not only is he a fabulous vocalist but the sheer athleticism he invokes to inhabit the horrible hide of Edward Hyde is nothing short of prodigious.
            Bermudez’s performance rises above a show that’s a dark and eerie tale (based somewhat on Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”) but elongated  principally by the presence of standard-issue ballads given to its female characters – Jekyll’s fiancée Emma Carew (Dacara Seward) and the archetypical prostitute with a heart of gold, or at least a good heart, Lucy Harris (Melissa Musial).
            On the other hand, the opening number “I Need to Know” and the telling “This Is the Moment,” both rendered with muscular conviction by Bermudez, are essential dives into the character of the English doctor whose humanitarian motives ultimately undo him and wreak mayhem.
            This production boasts a huge cast, and it’s the ensemble numbers, choreographed for the small SDMT stage with ingenuity by Luke H. Jacobs, that are the most inspired in “Jekyll & Hyde” Case in point: the first-act romp inside the Red Rat, where the ladies-for-hire reside and where during “Bring on the Men,” Musial brings to mind Madeline Kahn’s Lili Von Shtupp in “Blazing Saddles.” Another highlight is the second-act-opening “Murder” (no context needed), with the company collectively expressing the shock over the gory crimes committed by some mystery fiend.
            That second act is far superior to the first frankly because it’s action-packed, and shorter. Even with its overall length, however, “Jekyll & Hyde” is an entertaining thrill ride in the hands of director Omri Schein, a versatile artist who has a smart way with material like this.
            This production affords some gifted actors character parts they can sink their teeth into as well: Tanner Vydos as Jekyll’s loyal and steady lawyer, Utterson; Ruff Yeager playing Emma’s father (and Jekyll’s reticent ally) Sir Danvers Carew; Cameron Blankenship as Lucy’s despicable pimp Spider.
            Everyone’s authentically costumed by Chong Mi Land, with compatible hair and wig design by Monique Hanson. Bermudez alone has hair to spare.
            I could fantasize during this performance about how SDMT’s “Jekyll & Hyde” would play if a.) it were staged in a larger theater and b.) it had the benefit of a live orchestra instead of recorded music. Bigger and better.
            Yet the smallish confines position Hyde, at his most out of control, so close to audience members I could see some of them recoiling. You wouldn’t have that at, say, the Civic Theatre. (This show did play there, in 2012, by the by.)
             I don’t know how many tickets are still available for “Jekyll & Hyde the Musical” at SDMT this Halloween weekend – it closes on Sunday. If there are any, that’s one way to get the you-know-what scared out of you.
            “Jekyll & Hyde the Musical” runs through Nov. 2 at San Diego Musical Theatre in Kearny Mesa.

John Rubinstein in "Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground."                            Photograph by Maria Baranova

            There are certain protocols one is expected to observe when in the audience for the performance of a play, among them not applauding spoken lines throughout. That’s for afterward, or in some cases if warranted after a particularly impactful scene when the house lights darken. Or, if absolutely impossible to suppress, after a main character’s empowered or passionate moment of monologue.
            But a very discernible sense of the audience wanting to burst into applause, and to do so many times, hovered above the North Coast Repertory theatergoers last night during John Rubinstein’s performance of “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground.” I was among them, scarcely able to hold back. The one-person-show script written by Richard Hellesen and drawn in part on words written or spoken before crowds by Dwight D. Eisenhower is an intended enlightenment on the military hero and 34th president of the United States, but also a searing indictment of the America today under Donald Trump.
            As Rubinstein told me in an interview a few weeks ago for the San Diego Union-Tribune, Ike is a largely overlooked figure in presidential history today, known by most for coining the term “military industrial complex.” There was more – much more – to the man, Rubinstein said with adamance.
            So there was.
         Over two hours and two acts, Hellesen and Rubinstein show us that Eisenhower was an avowed moderate politically but a man of stout principle and unwavering belief in the virtue possible in America, a nation where differences didn’t have to create enemies, where high-minded truths were celebrated not castigated or denied, where a president always put the people above himself.
            What the hell’s happened?
         The San Diego premiere of this much-produced one-person-show is directed by Peter Ellenstein, who first brought the script to Rubinstein, an accomplished actor on stage, in film and on television. (He broke through as a young man starring in “Pippin” on Broadway; I have followed his career from there to the acclaimed “Children of a Lesser God” film and the “Family” TV series and even, as I joked with him in conversation, a memorable bit in the so-bad-it’s-fun horror flick “The Car.”)
            Rubinstein is 78 now and portraying Eisenhower at age 72 when “This Piece of Ground” is set in 1962 on Ike and Mamie’s farm in Gettysburg, Penn. His is not a quiet, studied oration but a cranky and often passionate performance with Eisenhower even pounding a desk for emphasis at one point. There’s more of the general than the commander-in-chief in this figure on stage, though the script has Rubinstein devoting the first act to the military years and the second act to the presidency.
            As we drop in on Ike at home, he’s rankled about a poll published in a magazine in which historians have rated, top to bottom, U.S. presidents up to the year 1962. He’s been placed at No. 22, a designation defended by the scholars who deem him to be so-so, even mediocre. The magazine folded over to the ratings page becomes Rubinstein’s principal prop during the show; we keep waiting for him to hurl it across the room. He’s too dignified to tear it to pieces.
            The narrative goes that the retired Eisenhower is going to write a book about his years in public service – though he doesn’t really want to. After an opening phone call to that effect with his book editor, he can’t help himself but dictate into a tape recorder just the kind of self-analysis and candor that such a book might include if written.
            As Eisenhower rolls through the years, from growing up in Kansas with a strict father and a religious mother (who hated war, by the way, but always supported her son), to entering West Point, to the valor and terrors of World War II and onto into the campaign and presidential years, Rubinstein is tireless and ever on point, moving here and there around the comfortable living room set by Marty Burnett. A backdrop “window” shows the bucolic Pennsylvania farm country and the skies above that darken as a storm beckons, then arrives. Facilitating the trip through history and giving it visual enhancement are strategic projections by Joe Huppert of the historical personages and family members of Ike’s past.
            I acknowledge having known very little about Eisenhower when I sat down in the theater. He was supreme commander of the Allied forces, yes I knew that. He was the impetus for the interstate highway system, I knew that too. Not much more. So for me, and likely for many others, “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground” is an illuminating history lesson and certainly a portrait of a man who, from a personal standpoint, they either don’t know or understand or even remember well.
            Like a No. 22 on a list of 35, right?
            Not being a historian myself, I don’t know whether Hellesen’s script idealizes Eisenhower in addition to profiling him. That may be so. Copious research would be needed to make a judgment either way.
            But I will say this: I’m thinking of Dwight David Eisenhower today far, far more than I ever have before, and my curiosity about him and his life has grown substantially.
            Hellesen does not portray Eisenhower as a man without flaws or failures during his two lives of public service to his country. If he had, no amount of commitment brought to the role by Rubinstein could give this play the weight of importance that it has.
            Then there’s that inescapable parallel between the Eisenhower principles and the unprincipled presidency of today. It’s likely that Hellesen was fully cognizant of that parallel in writing “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground.” Sometimes, he may be trying to tell us, history does not repeat itself – it sinks to the depths. We can only hope that someone else who truly loves America for its inherent good and for the good that its people can be, comes along to lead it, and honor it.
            “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground” runs through Nov. 23 at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach.

"Arms and the Man" skewers love and war in Coronado.       Photo courtesy of Lamb's Players Theatre

            Not that there’s any doubt about what George Bernard Shaw thought of war in his searing “Arms and the Man,” but one line in the play – delivered by a “heroic” soldier! – all but shouts Shaw to the rafters: “War is a fraud! A hollow sham!”
            Romanticized love does not escape Shaw’s jaundiced eye either in this costumed affair set during the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian War. When another of his characters declares life to be a farce, he might as well have been indicting the sort of swooning, breast-heaving romance coveted by “Arms and the Man’s” heroine, the lovely aristocrat Raina Petkoff.
            So was Shaw, not even 40 when “Arms and the Man” premiered in 1894 just an “old” cynic, or did he have a valid point about two entities – war and love – that had been so idealized by writers as or less estimable than himself?
            As Lamb’s Players Theatre’s high-style production of “Arms and the Man,” directed by Deborah Gilmour Smyth (who played Raina herself at Lamb’s in the early ‘80s) and populated by a fun-loving cast suggests, Shaw knew what he was doing.
            “Arms and the Man” actually begins when the war between Bulgaria and Serbia has ended after only two weeks of fighting, with the former winning – winning what is not completely clear. Read your history books. In the house of Petkoff, Raina (Megan Carmitchel) can scarcely sleep for the thought that her beloved, Major Sergius Saranoff (Spencer Gerber) will be returning from the fray. So will her father, Major Paul Petkoff (Manny Fernandes), though neither Raina nor her mother Catherine (Melissa Fernandes) seems that jacked up this prospect.
            In the wake of some unnerving gunfire outside, Raina is roused from sort-of-sleep by the intrusion through her window doors of an exhausted, sword-bearing mercenary (MJ Sieber) who had been fighting on the side of the Serbs. For Raina, fear quickly gives way to fascination with this sputtering soldier, a man for whom the concept of heroism is hard to swallow and who, he tells her, prefers to carry chocolates than ammunition in his cartridge belt. So when a Bulgarian solider (Jordan Miller) invades the Petkoff home searching for an escapee, Raina hides her harried intruder from capture.
            Sweets for the sweet? She’s also fed the weak-with-hunger mercenary from her own box of chocolates.
            Much of the laughter from this entire ruse stems from the involvement of Raina’s mother; the two form a conspiracy to keep this episode from the ears of the returning majors, Petkoff and Saranoff.
            The minute we meet Sergius Saranoff, strutting like a peacock in military uniform and obviously loving himself more than he can love Raina or any woman, our sympathies are with the mercenary, who later arrives at the house, taut and cleaned up and identified as a Captain Bluntschli. Maybe his and Raina’s first encounter couldn’t be called a meet-cute, but there were enough indications from the start that these two were fated for coupling.
            Heightening the hapless intrigue is the presence of Raina’s maid Louka (Lizzie Morse, understudying for Katie Karel the night I saw this show). Unhappy with her domestic lot and far shrewder than the lady on whom she attends, Louka feigns disgust at Saranoff’s transparent flirtations, but she can’t conceal preferring his swagger to the doting, lecturing attentions of the house’s head manservant, Nicola (John Rosen).
            Not surprisingly, Raina’s secret gets out, and it’s only a matter of time before all concerned learn the identity of the “chocolate-cream soldier” for whom she’s affectionately signed a portrait of herself. How that photo is discovered is part of the comic climax’s runaround.
            Shaw wrote these characters to be played broadly, and they are at Lamb’s, just as they were when I first saw “Arms and the Man” 10 years ago at the Old Globe. Emoting and gesturing are part of the playwright’s strategy to cast these figures as if not stereotypes, archetypes of romanticized lovers and idealized war heroes.
            No one does this more broadly than Gerber, a graduate of the Coronado School of the Arts who is making his professional debut here as the mustachioed, preening Sergius Saranoff. What a way to break into regional theater – with license to go all out.
            The versatile Carmitchel is as at home with farce every bit as she is with serious drama; her local resume testifies to that.
            Sieber may be known to area audiences for his visceral turns in Backyard Renaissance Theatre productions (most recently “A Streetcar Named Desire”) and at Cygnet Theatre, where he shone two years ago in its staging of “The Little Fellow (or The Queen of Tarts),” Kate Hamil’s comedy-drama. In “Arms and the Man” he’s able to make the frantic and exasperating mercenary of Act One as credible as the cool and sharp-witted Captain Bluntschli of Act Two.
            It’s always a hoot when the Fernandeses, Melissa and Manny, turn up in the same cast. They’re real pro’s who thrive on this kind of fare. (Interestingly, they’re pairing up as George and Martha – hardly your fun-loving couple – in Carlsbad Playreaders’ staged reading of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” on Nov. 3.)
            Not to be lost in the ebullient performances at Lamb’s is the period costuming of Jemma Dutra or the alacrity in which director Gilmour Smyth moves the story along.
            Two hours (with intermission), in and out.
            It was a strange feeling the night I saw “Arms and the Man” to be one of the few in the audience laughing out loud. Possibly the sedate crowd preferred to chuckle under their collective breath, or maybe many just didn’t understood the tenor of the show, or Shaw’s intent. I did hear one theatergoer behind me afterward, on the way out, say to another: “Well, that play had a lot of words, didn’t it?”
            I wonder if he realized how biting and insightful those words were, and are.
            “Arms and the Man” runs through Nov. 16 at Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado.

Deja Fields and Carter Piggee in "Blues for an Alabama Sky."                                Photo by Jason Sullivan

            There’s more than a little Sally Bowles in Angel Allen, who like the chanteuse from “Cabaret” residing in an anxious Berlin in the 1930s finds escape in her performances and in booze, except that in Pearl Cleage’s “Blues for an Alabama Sky,” Angel’s residing in an early-Depression Harlem. Like Sally’s, Angel’s life is significantly a hot mess.
            But Angel’s got one thing going for her: friends in and around the apartment building she’s crashed in who care about her, starting with her best friend of all – Guy Jacobs, a gay costume maker who dreams of dressing the great Josephine Baker in Paris and who has taken Angel in after she’s lost a job and a gangster boyfriend. Across the hall is Delia Patterson, an earnest social worker with a good heart; and just a jolly “Let the good times roll!” away is the neighborhood doctor Sam Thomas, who endearingly calls his friend (and patient, we learn later) “Angel Eyes.”
            These are Cleage’s characters that inhabit Cleage’s play, giving it life, humor, pathos and relatability. Who among us is lucky enough to have such friends, especially when life deals us a bad hand – or even if we, in our weaknesses and transgressions, deal ourselves that bad hand?
            Moxie Theatre has opened its 21st season with “Blues for an Alabama Sky” under the direction of its artistic director, Desiree Clarke Miller. Though its 90-minute first act is sluggish, the drama- and action-packed second act contributes to this production being the most riveting since Clarke Miller assumed her leadership role at Moxie two years ago. Cleage is an expressive and artful playwright, having created a ‘30s Harlem where historical figures like Rev. Adam Clayton Powell is preaching the Good Word, where Margaret Sanger, advocating for birth control, is Delia’s inspiration, and where Langston Hughes is a poet for the mind and for social change.
            While the struggle for daily survival that Angel (Deja Fields) find herself in is the impetus for most of the first-act tension, it’s the arrival on the scene of a gentleman suitor from the South, Leland Cunningham (Carter Piggee), that ramps up the stakes for Angel and at the same time rattles her friendship circle. It’s as if Cleage has, narratively speaking, lit a slow-burning fuse beneath the floors of Guy’s (Kevane La’Marr Coleman) and Delia’s apartment.
            Prior to Leland’s arrival, we’ve been allowed to revel in the characterizations played out with vibrancy on a Moxie stage that now extends from end to end, mirroring the audience seating area and facilitating a set by Michael Wogulis that depicts Guy’s apartment and the next-door apartment of Delia.
           Coleman is as charismatic as I’ve ever seen him as Guy, without whom Angel might be destitute. He’s also nattily dressed throughout by costume designer Danita Lee. As Sam the doc, Xavier Daniels is so full of life and fun – and yet understated when his affections for the shy and romantically inexperienced Delia (Janine Taylor) begin to bloom – that one longs for a doctor like him. Do they exist?
             The versatile and emotive Fields is following up her star turn in last year’s “Clyde’s” at Moxie with this layered performance, one that doesn’t conceal Angel’s flaws and bad choices in order to win simple sympathy. Her Angel is someone with a case of the blues that won’t go away even when a true romance seems to beckon. Booze, on the other hand, always is what it is.
             The relationship between Angel and Guy, and the chemistry between Fields and Coleman, are the backbone and spirit of “Blues for an Alabama Sky.”
            Cleage’s Delia and especially Leland characters are less fully developed, and when the latter voices his scarcely contained disapproval of the post-Harlem Renaissance liberation of thought and self (and of any behavior outside the purview of his Tuskegee home), the direction of the story and of Angel’s personal destiny seem preordained.
           Its jazzy music fills and intimations of a sweltering heat envelop “Blues for an Alabama Sky” in romance and danger. Though the setting is one Harlem apartment building these lurk both inside and out.
           “Blues for an Alabama Sky” runs through Oct. 26 at Moxie Theatre in Rolando.

Shana Wride and Andrew Oswald as siblings in misery.                                      Karli Cadel Photography

            Christopher Durang may not have intended “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” to be a deconstruction of Chekhovian characters but that’s certainly one way to regard his inimitable absurdist comedy. As with so many of his Russian literary comrades, Anton Chekhov’s characters can be (and frequently are) brooding, morose, self-flagellating, prone to disillusionment and depression. Just maybe Durang imagined “What would happen if these people not only snapped out of it but let it all out, went a little nutso?”
            Make that happen and you have “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” which I’ve seen three times now and just the other night in Cygnet Theatre’s brand-new intimate space The Dottie. It may be recency bias on my part, but this “Vanya and Sonia …” outshines even those I saw previously at Scripps Ranch Theatre and before that the Old Globe. It’s a delightful debut for The Dottie Studio, a production directed with high style by Anthony Methvin and featuring two of the finest performances of the year in Andrew Oswald as Vanya and Shana Wride as his adopted sister Sonia.
            The question that always surrounds this play is “Do I need to know the works and characters of Chekhov in order to ‘get it’”?
            No, though it’s more fun if you recognize some of the references to plays including “The Three Sisters,” “The Cherry Orchard” and “The Seagull.” The Chekhovian easter eggs are not dropped subtly in “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” so it doesn’t require an academic to connect with them. On the other hand, those who’ve never read a word of Chekhov will easily get into and appreciate a dysfunctional family story that at times feels like it’s been channeled through Samuel Beckett … or “The Twilight Zone.”
            Yi-Chien Lee’s peaceful, pastoral set evokes the beautifully sleepy environs of a country home in Bucks County, Penn. where outside of blue herons settling on a nearby pond not much happens. It’s here that Vanya and Sonia reside in a perpetual state of ennui, and in Sonia’s case, gloom. Their opening argument over the temperature of the morning coffee is about as lively as it gets in this joint.
            Things liven up considerably with the unexpected arrival of their gadabouting and completely self-absorbed sibling Masha (Eileen Bowman), she who’s been paying the bills to support a household where its current residents don’t work (and yet somehow employ a housekeeper who claims to have psychic powers). Accompanying Masha is a boy-toy wannabe TV “actor” who calls himself Spike (Sean Brew – a perfect fraternal brother name, no?) and who is prone to strut about in his underwear or at the very least sans shirt. This is uncomfortably and most attentively noted by Vanya, who is a closeted gay man.
            What happens isn’t the grist of weighty Russia novels (the prolific Chekhov wrote only one, “The Shooting Party,” but a slew of novellas and novelettes): Much fuss and furor swirls around a costume party at the former home of Dorothy Parker to which Masha has been invited – who’s going, who will wear what, et al; and the B-film star’s announcement at the end of Act One that she intends to sell the ancestral home.
            By the way, the reason for the Chekhovian names of these characters is explained early on, that the since-dead parents, both professors, had named their children after figures in the august writer’s plays.
            Meanwhile, it’s not enough that the self-deprecating Sonia is fiercely jealous of Masha, that Masha is tactless and egotistical to a prodigious degree, that Vanya is frustratingly world-weary and ever in the middle between the two, and that Spike is … well, Spike. Durang also utilizes the Cassandra housekeeper character (Daisy Martinez) for over-the-top antics and wise-ass remarks, then soon injects an innocent ingenue, Nina ( Emma Nossal) into the proceedings. It all gets very much on the verge of out-of-control comedy. It’s the poignancy of Sonia’s overriding loneliness and perception of a life unlived, and the suppressed urge to speak up and speak out inside Vanya that unearth the depth inherent in Durang’s play.
            The two most urgent and most affecting monologues of “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” arrive, naturally, in the second act:
 Sonia gets a phone call from a man she met but barely remembered at the costume party, asking her for a date. The audience, yours truly included, are with her every awkward second on the phone. Will she accept? Does she believe this is really happening to her? Wride’s performance here is understated and heart-rending.
            Then there’s Vanya’s eruption in the middle of a strange performance of a play he’s writing about world-ending climate change. Discovering Spike has been texting during, Vanya goes off, deriding the shallow excesses of the present and aching for the lost simplicities of a past gone forever. Masterfully, Oswald will bring tears to your eyes.
            Bowman, in the meantime, is in her comic element as Masha, one of those roles she seems born to play. Fittingly, her costume-party persona is Snow White – it was Bowman, dressed as Snow White, who performed with Rob Lowe in that shuddering skit at the 1989 Oscars. It must be cathartic for her to be playing that part for laughs today.
             Three times is probably enough “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” for me, and if it is I can revel in the fact that I enjoyed this one completely. The new Dottie is a nice companion to Cygnet’s larger Clayes Theater where “Follies” wraps up on Sunday. Its seat numbers are a little hard to identify and you’re close to your neighbors, but it was comfortable enough for a show (“Vanya and Sonia”) that runs two and a half hours, with intermission.
           “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” runs through Nov. 9 in Cygnet’s Dottie Studio Theater in Liberty Station, Point Loma.

Robert Montano stars in the one-person show "Small."                                        Photo by Rich Soublet II

            Having had a father who worked at Caliente Racetrack in Tijuana and who was not only a Thoroughbred lover but an owner, I grew up to some extent around horse racing. I even met jockeys, those little but powerful men who sat atop 1,200-pound equine athletes and in so doing put their lives at risk.
            But until I saw and heard former jockey Robert Montano’s one-person show, “Small,” at the Old Globe, I didn’t know the harrowing insider details of what some of these little but powerful men go through to maintain their racing-eligible weight:
            Drugs (ironically called “Black Beauties”). Flipping (aka purging). Ingesting Lasix (long ago banned for even Thoroughbred consumption). Wrapping themselves in plastic wrap. Practically living in a sauna. Eating just enough to stay alive.
            This is only part of 65-year-old Montano’s life story, but it’s certainly the most unnerving. I was reminded, in conversation after the performance, that a jockey’s drastic physical self-sacrifice is not unlike the driven ballerina’s, the desperate fashion model’s, maybe even the struggling prizefighter’s.
            In a tireless performance that could be the equal of an athlete giving his or her 100%, Montano begins his story inside the Sheryl and Harvey White theater-in-the-round sharing his youth growing up in the ‘70s less than half an hour from Belmont Park racetrack in New York. With a religious mother who was a jewelry maker and an artist father, he grew up with love, discipline and, in the case of Mom, some helicopter parenting.
            Yet it was Bobby’s mother who introduced him to the excitement and glamor of the track (glamor that horse racing, sadly, has little of today outside of the Triple Crown). It was there that he discovered his idol: jockey Robert Pineda.
            “Small” is not an extended monologue by any means. Montano plays not only his younger self, but his parents and all the characters at the track with whom he became familiar – some of them less than reputable.
            It is teenage Bobby’s big dream to be like his hero, Pineda, and under the professional jockey’s mentorship he begins a fast-moving but arduous quest to take the reins of a Thoroughbred himself.
            The arduous is where the above-mentioned torturous ritual of making weight – stepping aboard the “Monster” as jockeys refer to the scales – goes down.
            Montano’s shirt is soaked with sweat 15 minutes into the performance, so you can imagine what it and his hair look like an hour in. (The show runs an hour and 45 minutes, which is long by one-person show standards.)
            Even if you’ve never heard or read about Robert Montano, you’ll know where events are headed. The kid who was so small in elementary school that he was mercilessly bullied begins to grow, and the young man who once prayed to be taller soon is now praying not to grow anymore.
            A 5-foot-8 man is not going to maintain a weight of 110 pounds or less – this is young Bobby’s fate.
            It is dancing that saves Montano, who shows us how this transformation happens. “Small” ends before we learn of the stellar career he has enjoyed from his 20s on -- onstage, on television and in films. You’ll want to read all about it after the show’s over.
            This is a lively, breathless production that can captivate even if you don’t know a fig about jockeys or horse racing. It’s directed by Jessi D. Hill. Sound design is by Brian Ronan, who takes us to the track and to the disco with style.
            In spite of its darker elements, I couldn’t help but feel nostalgic and touched by Montano’s dramatized simple moments with the horses – like how it feels when that huge head nuzzles your face. That’s no small feeling.
            “Small” runs through Oct. 19 in the Old Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre in Balboa Park.