Dana Montana, one of the most fascinating and nice people we have ever met, has embarked on a new adventure that colorfully blends her expertise in the entertainment business with her lifelong passion for horses. It is, actually, two adventures in one: the Dancing Horses Dinner Theater and Animal Gardens, both of which share 40 lovely Wisconsin acres between Lake Geneva and Delavan.
“I fell in love with horses when I was a little girl and came to Wisconsin to visit my grandparents,” she says. “This has always been my dream, to have a place where I could share my love and let people see these magnificent horses. We allow the horses to do all sorts of amazing things.”
The show is eye-poppingly pleasing, but then Montana has always known how to put on a show. At first, she was it, in a sense, as one of the first gang of Playboy Bunnies, working at the original Playboy Club on Walton Street in the early 1960s. Married and divorced and with three young children to support, she later bought a roadside tavern near Lake Geneva that she named the Sugar Shack. For a time, the place featured what were then known as strippers. One of her performers was Sally Rand, the legendary diversion of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, who was still fan dancing well into her 60s.
Then one night nearly 30 years ago, Montana decided that what the world needed was nude male dancers. As she told me long ago: “It wasn’t that I was into women’s lib or anything like that. I just thought I knew women wanted a little sex in their lives. The problem is that the word ‘sex’ has these bad definitions for people.”
The place, the idea, was a sensation, leading to articles in national magazines, national TV appearances and busloads of giggling women intent on innocent fun.
Montana raised those three kids, two daughters and a son, but she was never lucky in love. “I am through with men forever,” she told me more than a decade ago, and she has been true to that vow.
Where would she find the time? She works seven days a week.
The Sugar Shack, which now features both male and female dancers, though never in the same room at the same time, will soon host its one-millionth patron.
Most of them have been women from the Chicago area and now many of them are bringing their husbands and kids to the Dancing Horses Dinner Theater to witness an extravagant indoor production with music, lights and plenty of action: Think Las Vegas or Cirque du Soleil.
It runs on weekends through the end of the year. The Animal Gardens, which features a bird show, walking trail, petting zoo and other wild kingdom treats, will only be open until the end of the month, when the cold weather starts inching into Wisconsin.
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rkogan@tribune.com
