Alan Cumming to be master of ceremonies at Adelaide Cabaret Festival
Alan Cumming’s backstage parties in New York morphed into a nightclub, and Adelaide will soon share in the magic.
When Alan Cumming was on Broadway playing the louche and slightly sinister Emcee in the 2014 revival of Cabaret, he was moonlighting as political fixer Eli Gold in TV drama The Good Wife. Between eight shows a week and the TV shoots he had so little time for himself that nights on the town in New York were out of the question. So instead of grumbling about all work and no play, he made his own fun, and brought the party to his dressing room.
These backstage affairs at Studio 54 — a gathering of friends and hangers-on, with impromptu performances and Cumming working the turntables — very quickly became a thing. Someone had a neon sign made that announced Club Cumming. A drinks sponsor came on board. Soon, his party nights were one of the hottest tickets in town, but the vibe was determinedly eclectic and inclusive.
“We’d have people of all ages, all genders, all sexualities,” Cumming says. “The doorman would come up, and all the cast would be there, and friends would drop by. One time, I looked over and there was Meryl Streep talking to a chorus boy’s mum. I thought, ‘This is great, there’s no velvet rope’. I don’t like that hierarchy. That to me is what it’s all about, mixing people up, having experiences that they wouldn’t necessarily have had.”
The backstage party was formalised in 2017 when Club Cumming opened as a permanent venue in the East Village. And Australian audiences will be hoping some of that nightclub magic rubs off on them, when Cumming next year takes over the Adelaide Cabaret Festival as artistic director.
No, he’s never devised a festival program before, but how hard can it be for an entertainer who is also an impresario and club host? One of the things he loves most about Club Cumming is the putting together of headline acts and surprising sideshows, all in the same room. He wants to bring that energising fusion to Adelaide.
“Cabaret is about a lot of seemingly disparate things coming together — song, monologue, spectacle, magic, all these different things,” he says. “When I do my own cabaret shows, I really enjoy the way you curate the evening. You can have a hilarious bit next to a very emotional bit. So I suppose it’s sort of a natural leap that I’m doing it for a whole festival.”
Not that there’s much cabaret or any form of live entertainment happening when Review catches up with Cumming via Zoom. It’s breakfast in Sydney, wine o’clock in New York, and Cumming is munching on peanuts and sipping from a glass of white. He’s a boyish 55, with his Scots brogue and that famous getting-away-with-it grin. For weeks now, he’s been ensconced at the rural home he shares with his husband in the Catskill Mountains. He pans the camera to show a snug room with bookshelves and windows looking on to the early summer twilight.
The lockdown must be quite a shock to the system for someone used to being in the public eye. On TV he’s known for The Good Wife and for his lead role in the short-lived police drama Instinct. His films include parts in Emma, Goldeneye, Josie and the Pussycats and, um, The Smurfs.
On stage, he’s been in everything from a one-man version of Macbeth to his solo cabaret turns in shows such as Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs, which he brought to Adelaide in 2017. Just before the coronavirus lockdown, he was on stage in London with Daniel Radcliffe, in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. On top of that, he’s a published author (his memoir Not My Father’s Son describes a tyrant of a father and a childhood of fear and humiliation), entrepreneur and activist on matters such as animal cruelty and circumcision (a practice he regards as “genital mutilation”). What sets cabaret apart from the garden variety of variety show, he says between peanut munches, is the provocation and transgression. Cabaret should not leave the spectator unprodded or unmoved. It’s not just humour, but satire with a shiv. Not just songs, but songs with pain and bite.
A political edge often gives cabaret its currency, and it’s for that reason Cumming says cabaret is what’s needed, right now.
He detects the zeitgeist of 1920s Berlin in some of the political upheavals of the early 2020s — especially in the alarming rise of authoritarianism.
“It very much reminds me of the Weimar cabaret scene, which was so provocative, so on the edge, in terms of politics and social issues,” says Cumming. “It’s that time in the world when so many things are being discussed and there’s so much to say — this idea of oppression, of crisis.
“Even before the COVID thing, and the worldwide reassessment of racism, there was the climate crisis, the refugee crisis. It’s the confluence of all these things ... Artists are really important to our society, they have a function — not just to entertain but to provoke. That’s exactly what the Weimar Republic was like.”
But cabaret also should be fun, and Cumming wants to bottle and export some of the atmosphere of his backstage parties and the anything-goes line-up of Club Cumming. He calls it “curated spontaneity”.
“I want to get away from the idea that cabaret means somebody with a feather boa wrapped around them singing Maybe This Time,” he says.
“Club Cumming very much represents my spirit — it’s a cabaret bar, there are all sorts of different people. It’s kind of got a theme. Mondays, people get up and sing. Tuesdays is jazz, Wednesdays is comedy. But people drop in all over the place and there’s a pretty wide spectrum of things. Tuesdays we have a knitting night earlier on. The eclecticism of it is something that I feel is very much my brand. We have a motto, ‘anything can happen’, and I think that’s a pretty good motto to have for a cabaret festival.”
While holed up in his Catskills cocoon he’s been writing a new book and has been filming segments for an online series he’s making for the National Theatre of Scotland called Scenes for Survival. He was due to make a rare outing to the city the week after this interview — the exciting prospect of a visit to the dentist.
Performing is his lifeblood, but he is adamant that he doesn’t want to return to the theatre until it is safe to do so. Live-streamed performances from people’s homes or empty studios are one way to maintain a connection with the audience, he says, but it’s hardly the same thing as the gathering of a community that happens around a theatre.
He finds it ironic that, during the lockdown, artists have been making themselves available to raise morale and funds for medical workers, while also finding themselves without work due to theatre closures, or because governments take an axe to arts budgets in times of austerity.
“At the beginning of COVID, I was talking to some friends who are actors and well known — they were being bombarded by people who want you to say something, or do something, or send a message ... It’s an interesting thing that in times of crisis, artists are the first group in society that people go to for guidance and for solace. That’s such a great honour, but also sad, that as soon as things go back to normal — ‘oh, sorry, we’re having some cuts’.”
Cumming’s appointment as the next Adelaide Cabaret Festival artistic director was announced on the final night of Julia Zemiro’s festival, home-delivered online instead of in the theatre. This time next year, assuming theatres have reopened, Cumming wants the festival to be a celebration — a reawakening of the performing arts after the lockdown.
He’s not yet able to say which artists he wants to invite to Adelaide, but it won’t just be a roll call of his friends. A planned talent-spotting trip to the Edinburgh Fringe with the festival’s creative director, Ebony Bott, won’t be happening, but Cumming is looking forward to discovering cabaret talent from Australia and from Asia.
If he has his way, Cumming also will appear on the Adelaide stage. He was to have brought a new show to Australia in December — that promised tour also won’t be going ahead — but it may now help furnish his cabaret festival program.
“I hear a song, and then another song — I have a few things up my sleeve that are starting to percolate,” he says.
“The last show I did was called Legal Immigrant, because I’m an immigrant myself. It’s great to have something so sort of prescient. I think this one is about ... it might be about acting your age — the perils of.”
And, just like one of his best-known stage characters, Cumming will have the chance in Adelaide to play the Emcee. Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome — coming back to the cabaret never sounded so good.