Madame Thalia Brings Old Time Radio Show to Cafe Nine

Zohra Rawling — professional opera singer and the creative force guiding the troupe of performers in Madame Thalia — will be celebrating the heyday of radio and New Haven’s own role in it at Cafe Nine this weekend, even though she had her own tenuous but amusing experience with that medium about three years ago at WNHH, when she and fellow Madame Thalia member/musician Gretchen Frazier performed as a duo during the station’s annual fundraiser.

“It was hilarious. We are both classically trained, we both have degrees in this, we’ve both been working for years and years and years, and we start singing, and I’m like ‘something is wrong,’ and she’s like ‘something is terribly wrong.’ And then we are like, ‘we need to stop for a second,’ and she’s like, ‘I’m playing in the wrong key,’” said Rawling, laughing as she relayed her story.

Rawling’s infectious joy and boundless commitment to her art and fellow artists is at the heart of her next project for Madame Thalia’s Vaudeville Revue, which, since 2016, has been creating and performing shows in New Haven and elsewhere in the state. On Nov. 23, Madame Thalia will bring its latest show to Cafe Nine.

“This one is going to be a radio show set in the 1920s,” said Rawling. “I like doing the 1920s: it’s a lot of fun and there’s a lot of good music. It’s a great crossover from the vaudeville time period and we like to act things out, but the space is limited so we decided to do it as a radio show.”

The show is comprised of three sets of music, comedy, dancing and stories. It features a number of performers, some returning — including Rawling, singer and actor Marvin Pittman, musician and actor Tseitel Moise, and burlesque performer Vivienne LaFlamme — and some joining the cast for the first time, including Rawling’s husband Nathan on viola, Bob Scrofani on piano, and vocalist and musician Jennifer Hill.

In addition to the acts, there will be updates from the Harvard-Yale game — one from the 1920s, not the actual game going on that day — and commercials apropos to the setting and time period.

“Because it’s a radio show, we put in advertisements, and some of them are jokes but some of them are real products, like Dapper Dan and Coca Cola” said Rawling.

“What happens with me — because I like to know everything and I love history — it really just started out with understanding and having some background about A.C. Gilbert and his involvement with his radio station itself in that time period. But then I wanted to know the history of Cafe Nine and what we could pull into there, and it turned out to be fantastic…. Once I get this little bit, I start digging and digging and digging, and that’s going to add into more of the advertising as well.”

“I’ve learned so much about New Haven in general, and it’s really interesting,” Rawling added.

Digging Up Culture

As part of the show, the troupe is invoking WCJ 833, a defunct local radio station with a defunct call sign that belonged to none other than New Haven-based industrialist A.C. Gilbert in the early 1920s.

“When we were trying to decide what we wanted, we thought it would be great because it’s A.C. Gilbert, and he is such this monumental underpinning of New Haven” said Rawling.

“Gilbert started it” — the radio station, that is — “so he could sell vacuum tubes” she said. “He was a very passionate entertainer: he was a magician and then later he started selling magic kits and chemistry kits and Erector Sets. It’s fascinating. I talked to Bill Brown at Eli Whitney and got a lot of good info about how Gilbert may have played into this time period and our use of the radio station itself.”

“I am so faithful to the museums and things around this city, so I’ve spent a great deal of time talking to Bill and also at the Institute Library, which was essentially me stalking dead people,” Rawling added with a smile. “I’m there going through the directories, which is just a really romanticized version of saying I was looking through the yellow pages, the literally yellowed pages.”

Rawling also made sure to use the history of Cafe Nine, the show’s location, from that same time period. “Of course Cafe Nine has a history,” she said. “Before prohibition, Richmond Harris owned it and it was called the Harris R&C Company, and they sold liquor, which is hilarious.”

“When prohibition passed, they became a grocer, and then when prohibition was repealed, they went back to liquor, which I thought was interesting — that they were able to go back and forth so quickly,” Rawling added. “I have no proof that they were selling alcohol then too, but I’d like to pretend because that is funny.”

Other local and storied traditions will also be incorporated into the Cafe Nine show.

“We are actually the same day as the Yale-Harvard game” said Rawling. “And there is information on every game going back over 100 years, so Marvin is going to be giving us a play by play. He’s going to pull in some actual facts about history and also some silly things that are completely fictional, but are also part of our modern popular culture.”

Blast From The Past

The troupe began back in 2016, planned initially as a regular show at Lyric Hall in Westville.

“I wanted to see if we could do vaudeville once a month, or even every other month, and we did okay. It was pretty successful in a way, but it just kind of petered out…. It was fun but exhausting for me because I was programming all the shows and because I kept picking different time periods.”

Hopping time periods is one of Madame Thalia’s ongoing traits.

“The whole premise of Madame Thalia is that it has no specific time, so that we can decide, ​‘hey, let’s do 1920s or 1890s or 1605’ if we wanted to. We have that option.”

The other option and ongoing trait of Madame Thalia that keeps it fresh and interesting is the pliability of the group of performers involved.

“Our group is very modular because not everyone is available all the time,” said Rawling. ​“I have this group of extremely talented artists” — musicians Gretchen Frazier and Adam Matlock, Pittman, magician Adam Parisi to note a few — ​“these people who have their own phenomenal careers. So I will say, ​‘hey I want to do this date, who’s available?’ And they let me know and we go from there, and because its modular we can perform whenever we want to, so we are not beholden on every single person having to be there.”

“That’s makes it really laid back and comfortable in a place where these people can try out different instruments, different music, different acts … even things they haven’t been able to present before,” Rawling continued. ​“This is an opportunity and a safe place for them to do that…. What I want is for people to have the opportunity to perform in a safe place with safe people. Everyone in this troupe is extremely supportive and kind and in different levels of talent in different things, For example, Gretchen, who is an amazing violist, is like ​‘I’m going to learn ukulele and play it,’ and I’m like ​‘Okay! Do it here!” she said, laughing again.

But who exactly is Madame Thalia?

“She’s the muse of comedy and she’s our benefactress, the mysterious benefactress,” said Rawling. ​“And for us she does exist. We don’t really talk about it. There is kind of a supernatural part in this, which is why we are able to essentially go from vaudeville on stage to radio and probably to television.”

“That is our kind of supernatural underpinnings, that this group continues to grow. We don’t know when it started, and that’s why we can go back in time as far as we like” she added. ​“We can do Roman music if we like. I want us to have that freedom.”

“At Lyric Hall we were pretty solid for a year or so, and then we were talking about moving around to other locations, which was scary, and so we started our first little tour going over to Lotta Studios down the street,” she said. ​“We were so brave, but not,” she added, laughing. ​“It was so wonderful and gave us our first little tour!” Since then they have done library gigs, including a holiday one at East Hampton library and one last spring in Lebanon. This Saturday’s show is the troupe’s first at Cafe Nine.

Rawling has been singing since her childhood in Flint, Michigan, which led her to York College in Pennsylvania, where she earned her degree and trained in opera. She has called Connecticut her home since 2005 and continues to perform regularly since arriving here.

“I’m a classically trained singer — that’s what my degree is in — and I sing opera. Recently I have been doing a lot of opera choruses,” Rawling said.
She was recently in Pagliacci with Salt Marsh Opera in Stonington. ​“That was a wonderful experience,” she said. ​“I think it’s fantastic how many little opera companies we have in Connecticut.”

Rawling is also already planning her next New Haven show, this time down the street and — you guessed it — set in another time period.

“We have another show booked called Cabaret du Neant,” she said. ​“We did it once before. It’s actually something from the late 19th century in Paris. They’re really obsessed with death and things of that nature, and there were three themed bars — Heaven, Hell and the Neant which is the cabaret of nothing, of the void. It was actually our first show at Lyric Hall and I wanted to do it again, so we are going to do it March 28 at The State House.”

As far as the future of Madame Thalia, Rawling wants her part in the New Haven scene to be one true to the idea of the muse herself.

“We are a modular group,” noted Rawling. ​“Everyone is welcome.”

“I firmly believe that there is enough room for everyone to make art,” she continued. ​“It’s not a competition. I want to make art, and I want people to have opportunities to make art. It’s really lovely when, say, Marvin brings a new artist to me and says ​‘this person would like to do a thing’ and I’m like ​‘ok we will find that for you.’ I don’t need to be the queen of it.”

And the lesson she took away from that WNHH incident?

“We did it on radio where everyone could hear us, and you know what? It’s OK,” she said. ​“We fixed it, and we did it again, and it was a lot of fun.
And that’s what I want. I want that for me, and I want that for everybody who wants it, and if I can help facilitate that I will do it. That’s why I love it.”

Madame Thalia’s Vaudeville Review is this Saturday, Nov. 23, at 9 p.m. at Cafe Nine. Tickets can be found at Cafe Nine’s website. Per the event page, 1920s party attire is encouraged. More info about Madame Thalia, including future shows, can be found at the troupe’s website.