Alan Cumming can’t wait for Adelaide Cabaret Festival
Why renowned actor Alan Cumming is pumped to be back in SA, back on stage and at the helm of the 21st Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
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Alan Cumming is feeling a tad daunted. Not so much at being at the helm of his inaugural Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Nor being the first international artistic director of the world-renowned arts fest.
It’s not even the thought of being back on stage for the first time in more than a year – although he confesses it will be somewhat of a culture shock. Rather, and ironically, the Olivier and Tony award-winning actor is not sure how he’ll feel about all the freedoms we Australians have.
“You know, coming to a country where you have still been able to do things that I haven’t been able to do for a year,” Cumming says, as we chat while he’s in quarantine in an Adelaide CBD hotel.
“Just going into a bar and having a drink with people, I’ll be overwhelmed.
“I do love the idea that people are putting masks on to go into a theatre. Firstly it blows my mind that you can go into a theatre at all, but also that (one of the few times) people in (Adelaide) wear a mask is to go into a theatre. It’s really fascinating.”
He’s played God, the Devil, Hitler, the Pope, a teleporting superhero, Hamlet, all the parts in Macbeth, and the EmCee in Cabaret in the West End and on Broadway so you’d think he’d be itching to be back on stage. But Cumming is philosophical when asked if he misses it, saying he’ll get songs in his head and think “I can’t wait to perform that”.
“It’s not as if the thing that I’m missing is even really happening right now,” Cumming explains. “It’s a quite good thing that is in-built in my constitution. I don’t miss things until I miss them. A lot of people miss things beforehand. You know ‘Oh, I’ll miss you’ and I’m like ‘well, miss me when I’m actually gone’. I don’t miss things that aren’t possible to miss.”
But he can’t wait to stand centre stage at the Adelaide Festival Theatre. It will be his first major foray in front of an audience since the Covid-19 pandemic started its devastating march across the globe.
The Adelaide Cabaret Festival is back in the Festival Centre after its online offering last year and Cumming says this 2021 program is his personal “love letter” to Australia. It features more than 180 artists in 105 performances over 12 glittering days and nights. Showcasing classic and contemporary cabaret with a touch of nostalgia, the 21st program includes 10 world premieres, four Australian premieres and 10 Adelaide exclusives including Songs of Don, L’Hotel, Tim Minchin, Young Talent Time 50th Anniversary and Deadly Arts.
Audiences will also get to experience his own famous bar Club Cumming each weekend, as the late-night hub in The Famous Spiegeltent. The replica of New York’s iconic venue will overflow with hedonistic delights, live performances, and raucous Cumming DJ sets until late.
“I’m very excited to be doing the Club Cummings to warm me up for my actual show,” Cumming shares. “It’s fun and casual. I want it to feel like it’s a party at someone’s house. It certainly doesn’t feel quite as tense as when you are the whole focus of the show and everyone’s quiet and listening to you. So I’ll get warmed up in that.”
The celebrated actor and cabaret artist truly is quite pixie-esque and Puck-ish as he nimbly jumps between topics and questions. Those words have often been used to describe Cumming. It used to quite annoy him.
“It was like I was a child – I understand what it means now, so I actually quite like it,” he shares.
And those terms have helped form his show which will close the Cabaret Festival on June 26 – Alan Cumming Is Not Acting His Age. He laughs when we ask exactly what age is he acting and confesses he forgets, at times, that he is 56 – and gets “confused’’, when reading scripts, why he is being offered the part of someone in their 50s.
“It’s interesting. I’m starting to feel things in my body as it changes and ages,” Cumming shares. “I don’t feel I sound my age or even look my age, or behave like my friends who are my age. Or even some who are younger than I am.
“There’s a variety of reasons for that. Partly just because I have a kind of curiosity for things. About seeing new things and new people.
“I wasn’t allowed that sort of curiosity in my childhood. So I think I’ve hung on to it much longer than most people do.”
The more Cumming chats about his show – which will tour nationally following its premiere at the Cabaret Festival – the more excited he becomes.
“There’s all these different themes about age and how we use it as a pejorative,” he explains. “You know, we say ‘oh, grow up!’ like you’ve got to get older. But then at the same time we encourage people to look younger and act younger.
“It’s no wonder people – well, I certainly am – confused about what is acting your age because we are all being given these different messages all the time.”
It’s an evening of story and song celebrating Cumming’s aforementioned Puck-ish spirit and joie-de-vivre. He reveals his opening number – “But Alive” which Lauren Bacall sang in little-known Broadway musical Applause.
“I heard the song and thought ‘what the hell?, I love this’,” he exclaims. “It’s a great way to open the show – ‘I feel groggy and weary and tragic, Punchy and bleary and fresh out of magic, But alive, but alive, but alive’
“I think that’s exactly how I will be feeling when I walk on.”
Cumming fell in love with our city when he first toured here some 30 years ago. And has a special place in his heart for A Touch of Elegance – the Channel 10 show which screened weekdays with fashion and lifestyle segments, interviews and advertorials. Pam Ellis and the late Margaret Glazbrook were the hosts when he appeared on the morning show.
He’s planning an installation at the Festival Centre, projecting old episodes and perhaps having some “Margarets” wandering through the foyers and chatting with patrons.
Cumming also developed quite a taste for our pie floaters after devouring many at the former pie cart at Victoria Square on that same trip.
He’s even whipped them up for fellow celebrities including a surprised Sir Barry Humphries when the Australian icon was on the Canadian set of one of the X-Men movies. Cumming loves them on every level – so much so he’s commissioning a vegan version to be the centrepiece of cuisine at his Cabaret Festival. There’ll also be vegan cheese platters served as part of L’Hotel. It certainly appears he has quite the appetite for a festival of food – is it as almost as important as the acts he’s carefully curated? “Well, you’ve got to eat,” he interjects with a cheeky grin.
Shows such as his own and Tim Minchin’s encore of Back have added extra performances which is heartening, but Cumming also hopes audiences will take a chance on performers who aren’t as well known.
“I’ve tried to have something for everyone,” Cumming says. “I want to try and encourage people to try something that is outside their comfort spot. It’s really important to stretch your mind as an audience member, as well as for us as performers.
“Like L’Hotel which is a fusion of performance styles – it’s cabaret, but also immersive theatre, mixed in with aerial. And it’s going out for a drink at the same time and getting all dressed up. I love that sort of pushing the boundaries of different forms.”
He’s also pushing the boundaries of traditional cabaret with his knitting interactive installation in the Festival Centre foyer. Yes, traditional knitting with needles and yarn – or fibre art as it is sometimes known. Some years ago, Cumming decided he wanted to learn so he employed Josh from the company Boy Meets Pearl.
“I actually love the way that knitting is something that so many people do but that they are also slightly ashamed of as well,” he says. “There is no place for shame. When Club Cumming opened in New York, one of the first things I programmed early on was a knitting night and what I love most is there’s little old ladies and there’s gay guys and mums – a whole range of people all come together and knit.
“We make absolutely no money because they just buy one drink, but I think it’s really great because it bring so many different people of different demographics together all doing something that they love.
“That’s also something I think is very important about this festival – if you want to knit, you can come and knit, but more than the knitting itself you can come and meet different people and, again, step out of your comfort zone.”
When we last spoke Cumming was glad to have escaped the circus that was the last few weeks in the lead-up to the US election. He was filming a musical comedy in Canada for streaming service AppleTV+ with fellow Broadway stars Kristin Chenoweth, Jane Krakowski and Aaron Tveit. He was nervously anticipating the outcome and confessed if President Trump stole the win, he’d leave his house in the Catskills in New York State and move back home to Scotland with husband Grant Shaffer.
He’s relieved that did not happen.
“There’s still some remnants of his horrible, vile legacy – the recent attacks on Asian people in New York, that’s a direct result of his rhetoric,” Cumming explains. “But it seems, thank God, like we are going in the right direction.
“There’s compassion and a plan. And kindness. But the best thing of all is just that we don’t hear from him. I saw a little clip of him the other day at a wedding. It was a rambling, incoherent speech at some poor people’s wedding and I just throught ‘that’s the first time I've thought of him for such a long time’. It’s the best thing – this sense of calm.”
That sense of calm is steadily being replaced by a growing sense of anticipation as he counts down the days to Adelaide Cabaret Festival’s opening night. Cumming can’t wait to see how his ideas fall into place and the feelings his festival will evoke in audiences. He likens it to the Field of Dreams iconic line “if you build it, they will come”.
“I think what I realised about having Club Cumming (in New York), if you tell people you want something to be, they come with it and they contribute to it so it sort of manifests itself,” he explains.
“That’s what I’m excited about – the spirit and the feeling I want this festival to have. And if I talk about it enough and there’s enough people who represent it in the performers, then the audience comes wanting to have a good time. And be a bit mischievous and keep their hearts open and try things that they are maybe a bit nervous about.
“And then we all have a drink and a laugh. That’s really what I want to happen.”
Adelaide Cabaret Festival, June 11-26; Alan Cumming Is Not Acting His Age, June 26, 4pm and 7.30pm, Festival Theatre. Tickets through bass.net.au
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