Rawling.
In preparing for the latest production from Madame Thalia — the Prohibition-era vaudeville show that music and theater mastermind Zohra Rawling is bringing back to Cafe Nine on Oct. 9 — Rawling thought of the last time she got to stage it in the club on State and Crown, in 2019. She ended a particular segment on a complete cliffhanger. “Tune in next time,” she recalled intoning to the crowd, only to have a member of the audience interrupt, yelling back “you monster!”; the cliffhanger was apparently too much anticipation for them to take. “I’ve done my job,” Rawling recalled thinking. “That was the best compliment I’ve ever received on stage.”
In a larger sense, the pandemic intervened to make the ongoing development of Madame Thalia a cliffhanger. The Oct. 9 show will mark the first time Madame Thalia has put on a show since that 2019 performance, after staging it previously at Lyric Hall in Westville; Rawling was slated to be part of an evening of cabaret at the State House in March 2020 that obviously didn’t happen. She considered staging it in 2021, only to have Covid foil her plans once again.
Bruce Wahl Photography
Madame Thalia at Lyric Hall.
This year, “I just wanted us to get back to performing,” Rawling said of setting up Madame Thalia at Cafe Nine again. This year’s show follows similar contours to 2019’s show, as it deploys the formats of a vaudeville theater and an old-school radio show, complete with a soap opera melodrama, musical numbers, local news reports, live magic, and manufactured commercials.
As before, it also digs directly into the history of Prohibition-era New Haven for its material. The advertisements on the radio show are for A.C. Gilbert products. “There will be refreshments, things you can take home. There’s a discussion about how you can get a doctor’s note for one quart of liquor a month,” Rawling said.
Rawling was drawn to the Prohibition era as a setting for her show because “there was a lot going on in this city and the state,” she said, which, according to her research, wasn’t particularly interested in ratifying Prohibition. Rawling began by making use of the possibly checkered past of the businesses that operated out of the building that now houses Cafe Nine during Prohibition. Before Prohibition began, the business at State and Crown was “a distributor of wine and beer,” Rawling said. Then, suddenly, when Prohibition came into effect, it became a grocery. “And, you know, I can’t say for certain that they were bootlegging, but it seems like a really quick switch — and also, they switched back really quickly” when Prohibition ended. So it’s fun story, a fun thing to think about.”
But Rawling also found places to flesh out and elaborate on the 2019 show. She learned, for instance, about Nellie Green, whose biographer, Tony Renzoni, dubbed the “Connecticut Bootlegger Queen” for his book about her, published in 2021. “To say that she was a force of nature is not enough,” Rawling said. She was an accomplished singer, performing at Woolsey Hall and in other cities. Meanwhile, she ran beer runs into and back from New Haven. She ran a hotel and kicked out people who were “rude or drunk — she wouldn’t stand for that,” Rawling said. “Her dad taught her how to box. They would hold illegal rooster fights, and if the cops came by she had a boat, and she threw all the chickens in there and she rowed them out where they couldn’t find them.… She had boats that could outrace the Coast Guard.” In addition to running booze, she saved about 20 people from drowning at a particularly dangerous bridge nearby.
All of this information was fuel for the show. But also, for Rawling, there are those intriguing blank spaces in the historical record, ways that the facts trail off into the apocryphal, the way the speakeasy ballroom underneath Ordinary was, it is said, the hub of a system of tunnels in downtown New Haven that allowed residents to enter the speakeasy undetected on the street, and even shower, shave, and get a haircut. The ballroom is there, as are the rooms that are evidence of grooming. The tunnels — if they were really there — appear to have been erased by construction projects over time. For Rawling, that means “we have to piece things together, and make up some interesting stories in the meantime.”
Joining Rawling on stage will be musicians Sarah LeMieux and Bob Scrofani as well as magician Adam Parisi. There will also be a screening of a short filmed piece by puppeteer Anatar Marmol-Gagné. “A lot of good cross-pollination of art,” Rawling said. She is routinely “astounded” by her colleagues in Madame Thalia. “I could give them the script and the music and not have one rehearsal and we could show up to the show and be great. They are that good,” Rawling said. But of course they do rehearse, a few times before the show to make sure everything runs smoothly. “We do a first big rehearsal, then a second music rehearsal. Then we run the whole show together.”
It’s work to develop and rehearse the show, and Rawling, a professional opera singer, is keenly aware of the sacrifices she and each of the cast are making to put Madame Thalia together. But Rawling does it because “I love it. I love dressing up. I love the history and showing that history. I like showing the good parts and the bad parts. People may not notice what they’re seeing, but it’s still going to be in there.”
Rawling has, by now, produced a series of Madame Thalia shows that are moving her ever closer to the present — and closer to the moment in history when live vaudeville theater ceded its ground to variety shows on television. Rawling has so far been committed to having the medium match the message, historically speaking. But performing for virtual audiences on Zoom during the depths of the pandemic showed her that filming something for a distant, absent audience wasn’t enough. Could she do a theater show about New Haven after World War II? In the 1960s and 1970s? Rawling thinks so; there is the connection she feels to a live audience, that “you can feel in the floorboards” when performing. “It turned out to be very important to me.… It wasn’t about validation. It was about entertaining people and their joy.”
Developing a live show has also helped Rawling see the many ways that vaudeville has persisted, from the Muppet Show to late-night talk shows to the Moth. “Vaudeville comes from a term from the 14th century,” Rawling pointed out. “It’s really old,” and “people still love it” — whether on television, on TikTok, or very soon, on the stage at State and Crown.
Madame Thalia comes to Cafe Nine on Oct. 9 at 4 p.m. Visit Cafe Nine’s website for tickets and more information.