Lucy Gellman Photo
Rawling.
Standing in the middle of Lyric Hall’s intimate stage, soprano Zohra Rawling was having a perfectly normal Thursday afternoon conjuring spirits, her voice reaching the rafters and pushing upward to the roof. Oooo oooo ooo ooooooohhhoo, she sang, the first of three puppets appearing before her with neat, ruby red lips and a bone-white face. Ooooooo oooo, she continued. A few backstage cobwebs dissolved with the vocals.
Right on cue, stilt-walker-cum-ghost Allison McDermott teetered behind Rawling, waving her arms to the music. Another puppet appeared, and an opera got underway.
Courtesy Le Tre Fecini
A member of vaudeville-inspired troupe Le Tre Fecini, Rawling was rehearsing for Cabaret du Néant (literally, the tavern of the dead), a Halloween extravaganza taking place this Saturday at Lyric Hall. With fellow troupe members Anna Luther on flute and Lindsey Reiker on piano, as well as guests McDermott on stilts and Gretchen Frazier on violin, she plans to unveil a Victorian-meets-vaudeville narrative that not only delights and spooks the audience, but primes them for a forthcoming bi-monthly cabaret attraction at Lyric Hall.
“I’m really excited,” said Rawling, who grew up in Flint, Mich., and has lived in Connecticut for several years, in an interview Wednesday. “This is entirely new from a production angle — I’ve never been on that part of performance. We’re all working together, in that we’re making a story, and I’m really enjoying it.”
The it specifically is the flirtation with Victorian-era seances, spirit photography, and spiritism in Europe and the U.K. that has long enchanted Rawling. Every social movement and time period had a way of dealing with mortality and the uncertainty of an afterlife; this was just a much more interesting one, filled with the involved narrative, death-defying romance, treachery, intrigue and loss endemic to a spooky vaudeville or opera.
Frazier.
Enter Luther and Reiker at just the right moment. After a show that Le Tre Fecini had March of this year, Pennsylvania-based Reiker mentioned that she had always wanted to do a sort of cabaret or revue, and Luther and Rawling jumped eagerly onboard. The three, who met studying music and performance at York College of Pennsylvania, use their performances as time to catch up with each other and push the creative boundaries of the work they’re doing — while having a lot of fun — and this was an opportunity to fuse all three. They began looking into works that were tragic, scary, quirky, or, Rawling says, particularly Halloweeny, previewing them on YouTube, and an unexpected narrative emerged.
Rawling and McDermott.
From a song made famous by Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, the spirit-puppet Sally was born, ready for the unrequited love the evening would bring. When “Poor Wandering One” slipped into a minor key, fantastically spooky vibes ran through the group. Just when Le Tre Fecini thought it might be missing a song, Rawling tried out the ballad of Pretty Polly to wild success, and another puppet substory with a quickly christened “unable Mable” was born. After her came the need for a foil, and Frederick was born, the child of revised sheet music, a hot glue gun, and some props.
Saturday, the five-member cast plans to tell a story where their spectral narratives weave in and out of each other, overlapping in musically predictable — and not-so-predictable — ways. The event is a sort of preview or test-run for a bi-monthly cabaret that Le Tre Fecini plans to roll out at Lyric Hall in January 2017.
True to that tradition, Rawling said, the audience may end up more delighted and entertained than spooked.
“At the end of it,” she said, “I think you’ll still be able to sleep.”
Cabaret du Néant takes place this Saturday, Oct. 29, at Lyric Hall at 8 p.m.. Tickets are $15. More event information here.
