Dino's Backstage welcoming Marilyn Maye to Glenside this weekend

You might call Glenside's opulent new Dino's Backstage & the Celebrity Room the room that Marilyn built.

That would be 88-years-young chanteuse Marilyn Maye, who will perform this weekend at the club that Philly restaurant vet Dino J. Kelly-Cataldi and his vocalist husband, Michael Richard Kelly-Cataldi, created pretty much just for her.

"We built it for artists of her caliber, which is really only Marilyn," says Michael Richard, a big-voiced baritone who's performed his Tin Pan Alley act globally and who knows the pitfalls of a lousy cabaret room. "Dives such as that" are what Dino — onetime owner of Napoleon's on Locust Street — calls "shabby, with ineffective lights and sound, and a black sheet for a backdrop."

That doesn't mean Maye — the hilarious queen of rubato with a voice masterful in its nuance, power, and range — won't sing for her supper at Dino's. She's been doing that since she was a kid in Kansas. After an appearance on Steve Allen's talk show, she was signed to a seven-album contract with RCA in 1965. She made 76 appearances on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, and was a regular in Philly on The Mike Douglas Show.

"This is my job, to entertain those who give their money and time," she says during an interview en route to another appearance in a packed schedule that's booked with gigs and master classes until 2018. "Look, I wasn't meant to cook or do housework. I had three husbands — all alcoholics — and one meaningful relationship in my life, along with a daughter I love."
She and one of her husbands, Sam Tucker, a "genius jazz pianist," worked the nightclub circuit before landing an 11-year engagement at the Colony in Kansas City, Mo., when she was in her 20s. At RCA, producer Joe Rene made sure she received "first-class treatment" (arrangements by Don Costa and Manny Albam) for Meet Marvelous Marilyn Maye, The Second of Maye, The Lamp Is Low, and more. Yet she felt shoehorned — a jazz singer stuck in a pop world.

"You nailed it on the head," she yells. "That was a conundrum for me and the DJs who wanted to play me. 'Where is she? Broadway, jazz, standards?' They would call Rene and ask, 'What bag is she?' He would make it easy for himself and label me the compleat singer. C.O.M.P.L.E.A.T." she spells with a laugh.

After her label run ended with 1970's Girl Singer, Maye soldiered on. She taught the fine art of performing ("Learn how to hold a mic, not eat it like the kids on American Idol. Follow the songwriter's commas. Pick a key that suits you, not one you like"). Did Broadway shows way off-Broadway. Crooned the songbooks of piquant lyricists such as Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer — "because he was a singer and knew how to apply the right notes to the right words, even note accents on the smallest of words" — in supper clubs on the unending road.

In 2005 and 2006, she tested the waters of Manhattan's rich cabaret land — a land she hasn't left since, after lining them up around the corner during her 2006 concert appearance at Lincoln Center's Rose Hall for the Mabel Mercer Foundation. "I hadn't been in Manhattan in 20 years before this time. I thought they forgot me, if they knew me at all. They hadn't."

Michael Richard Kelly-Cataldi and cabaret local Eddie Bruce discovered Maye in 2013, with Bruce urging Michael to take a Maye master class in New York after one of her gigs at 54 Below.

"She was amazing. She thought we were fun and invited us to her birthday party at Don't Tell Mama," says Michael. After seeing Maye at 54, Dino went the extra step ("that's what I do") and called the Sweet Corner Bakery in Chelsea to arrange for the biggest cake designed to look like an open baby grand piano.

"Who knew, though, that she was a cake fiend?" says Dino J., a lover of all things cabaret who had a similar baby grand in Napoleon's. From there, friendships formed. The Kelly-Cataldis even named their white convertible Rolls-Royce with red piping "Miss Maye."

When talk turned, in 2014, to opening a gorgeous place where she would feel comfortable, with a superpowered sound and light system, Maye said, "No, honeys — but if you're going to do it, hurry. I won't be alive forever." With that, Dino's Backstage & the Celebrity Room was born.
"Philadelphia should be amazed by the loving care Dino and Michael took," she says. "I'm overwhelmed. It's just the right kind of intimacy, but fun. Because when I work a room, no matter the size, it's a party."

Marilyn Maye, Friday through SundayOctober 21-23, Dino's Backstage & The Celebrity Room, 287 Keswick Ave., Glenside, 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, $250, includes butlered hors d'oeuvres and cocktails, three-course dinner, after-show dessert buffet, meet-and-greet and CD. Black tie requested. Also 7 p.m. Sunday, $75 with $20 food/beverage minimum. 215-884-2000, dinosbackstage.com.