INTERVIEW: For his latest cabaret show, Alan Cumming gets deeply personal
Photo: Alan Cumming performs Saturday, June 22, at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Auger Photography / Provided by the State Theatre with permission.
When Alan Cumming takes the stage Saturday, June 22, at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he’ll be both excited and terrified. These are the feelings that go hand in hand when touring a new cabaret show. He’s energized by the chance to bring an intimate, deeply personal set of songs and stories to audience members who have supported his theatrical performances over the years, but that hyper-intimacy is also nerve-wracking, especially because this new show is quite different than his previous efforts. He plans to live up to the show’s title: Alan Cumming: Uncut.
“They’re all my children, you know,” Cumming said in a recent phone interview about his cabaret performances. “You can’t really choose one over the other. Each show is about what I’m feeling I want to talk about and sing about at the time. I mean, all these shows are quite intimate and personal, and this one I thought I could take to another level. That’s why I called it Uncut. It’s undiluted, unadulterated, about being whole. It’s about being an outsider, and how that can be sometimes, but ultimately it gives you a really good perspective on life. I’ve only done it a couple of times, but I really enjoy how so broad it is. It’s only me and the piano. I don’t have my band this time, so it’s very intimate and vulnerable.”
Cumming has made a name for himself in so many different settings. He truly personifies the biographical moniker that he’s a star of stage and screen. His performance as the Emcee in Cabaret is legendary and still fondly remembered by an entire generation of theatergoers. His movie credits include everything from The Tempest to X2: X-Men United to Spy Kids and Emma. These cabaret performances have been going strong for Cumming over the past 15 years, with him regularly touring new “evenings of” around the country.
“I’ve made a little list of songs I might sing and stuff like that,” Cumming said about his development process. “It starts to slowly form, and then [I add] stories about things that have happened to me. Oh, that’s in the theme of this. I don’t sit down and think, OK, this is the show I’m starting to write today. It happens over a period of a long time sometimes, and slowly all the pieces come together. Eventually I’ve got to sit down and collate it all, but I like to let the songs come to me and the ideas come to me and then form them after that.”
Up on stage at the State Theatre this Saturday will be pianist Henry Koperski, who has been Cumming’s musical director for a few cabaret shows. The two are old friends, and they started thinking about this new show when Cumming was performing his last one: Alan Cumming Is Not Acting His Age.
“I would sort of tell him where I was with it,” Cumming said. “He would suggest some songs. We sort of worked on it on and off a little bit for months, and then we went away. We actually went to Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, and we went there and kind of developed for a couple of weeks and really banged out a sort of structure for it. He’s very much involved. I bounce ideas off him all the time. He’s a really big part of it.”
One might expect that any new artistic venture for a tried-and-true performer like Cumming would not produce nerves or even terror, but they do. Uncut is so personal and so untested that the singer is not afraid of admitting that he’s afraid.
“It is scary,” he said. “My sort of ambition with this one was to try to make the audience not clap until the end. Instead of it being story / song / story / song, which the other ones are like, I just thought it would be nice to keep it going so it’s one big thought. I sort of speak over the songs and never properly finish, so that’s quite scary to try to do something new. One of the things I like best about doing this sort of show is you are very vulnerable. You are very intimate. You make a really strong and personal connection to the audience and lay yourself out there, so I both love that and fear that because it’s terrifying, especially when it’s newer and you’re getting used to it and working it all out. It’s terrifying that feeling of being ill-prepared. … There’s a double whammy. It’s scary because it’s new, and you feel ill-rehearsed and ill-prepared, and you’re just desperately trying to remember it. And [it’s] scary because you’re also going to say things that maybe you’ve not really ever said in public before.”
Cumming added: “I mean, it is a performance, but I am talking about real things that happened in my life and real emotions that I’ve had and real feelings that I have. I go pretty deep, and it’s also funny. … You can change the genre of the songs you’re singing as well really quickly, and I love that. It’s still me, even though it’s a performance. It is the most intimate I think you can be as a performer because not only is it a very intimate setting, you’re also in this way discussing your own life in a very intimate way.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Alan Cumming: Uncut will play Saturday, June 22, at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Click here for more information and tickets.
