ALAN CUMMING

“I associate my kind of wit and humour with the Australian spirit.”

Alan Cumming loves Australia. The flamboyant actor and writer was first in Adelaide in 1989 and has been back many times. This year he’s the first nonlocal Artistic Director of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival (June 11 to 26).

Between Oz visits, Cumming has earned an international reputation as a screen and stage actor and as a writer. He redefined the role of the MC in a Broadway production of Cabaret, and on the small screen he created the eternally cynical media manipulator, Eli Gold on The Good Wife. He has been nominated for three Emmys and two Golden Globes.

There’s a serious side, too. He explored his tortured relationship with his dad in Not My Father’s Son, which became a New York Times best-seller. Then there was his plea for “circum-sanity” in the book May The Foreskin Be With You.

There’s also his men’s fragrance, Cumming.

He currently lives in New York City with his husband, illustrator Grant Shaffer. Via Zoom, and in his thick Scottish brogue, he spoke to Ian Horner for DNA.

DNA: You’ve said that cabaret, as an art form, must agitate and provoke. What’s been the criteria for signing up acts for the Adelaide Cabaret Festival this season?

Alan Cumming: Just that. With covid there’s been another whole layer of pragmatism to deal with. I had to regroup and ask myself, “What do I actually want to do?”

And?

I realised so many of my own early formative experiences of doing cabaret was with and around Australians. That’s why I love you so much! I associate my kind of wit and sense of humour and openness with the Australian spirit, and this year’s festival has become a real celebration of Australian cabaret and Australian artists. It’s been very exciting to shine the spotlight back on Australia. I want to celebrate the form of cabaret.

I’m the first non-Australian artistic director of the Festival and people expected I’d bring all sorts of fancy people from afar. But no! The festival opens with Adelaide Tonight With Bob Downe and Willsy.

Let me say, I was born in Adelaide and

Adelaide Tonight was a staple. I was a producer on such shows here in Sydney. To think Anne Wills is still going strong is amazing!

I know! Bob and Willsy’s show will be a nightly homage to Adelaide Tonight and full of Australian cabaret artists with talk and chat and people dropping in all the time.

In 1999, I was on Adelaide TV on A Touch Of Elegance when I was in Australia for Victor And Barry, a live show I did with Forbes Masson. I thought everyone in Adelaide would remember A Touch Of Elegance. Apparently not. I said let’s do it anyway. We’ll have an installation with videos of the show and people wandering around.

That was when I got to know Barry Humphries. He was on the show, too. In fact, he got banned from television because of it. There’s that subversive thing again! The show was a mix of kitsch and subversion; very exciting. Talk about selling coal to Newcastle – I’m reviving an Adelaide show that I was on and I’m from Scotland and talking to you in Sydney about it from New York!

You were hoping to get Reg Livermore’s creation, Betty Blokk-Buster…

I’m so sad that’s not happening because Betty completely epitomises what I want to do – a homage to something very Australian, a glamrock variety cabaret. They lost the money from their grant or something and had to pull out – just traaaaaagic. Covid has done some dreadful things.

Reg Livermore and Barry Humphries were at the forefront of their brand of arty larrikinism. Are current Australian comics still as brave?

It’s a different time. It’s hard to be that outrageous anymore because so much of our humour is about people saying taboo things. Comedy has become a shock-fest, less about wit and cleverness. Cabaret is not just about being funny and telling jokes, and it’s certainly not just a girl with a feather boa around her neck singing Maybe This Time. It’s about how you use that artform to tell other stories. There are some great shows in this festival that do that well. There’s a girl doing a show called Boobs about how she had a double mastectomy. That’s really fascinating to me.

I’m also excited about L’Hotel. It’s this immersive show where you’re having dinner and all these different artists are spinning around you – acrobatics and atmospherics. >>

>> Really exciting.

Australia has always been at the forefront of trying different things. Like Bob Downe. I first met Mark Trevorrow, Bob’s creator, back in 1988 and thought, “What the hell is this!?” It’s both parody and homage to a style of performance, and even if you’d never seen that original style of performance, you’re aware it’s being parodied. Really exciting.

And you’ve got queer comic Hans (Matt Gilbertson), marking Adelaide’s German pioneers.

I love him. He’s hilarious and glam. The queerness of the festival is so much more pumped up than normal thanks to my choices. But that queerness, and openness, and sprinkling of glitter over everything is exactly what cabaret should do for people.

Club Cumming is coming?

Indeed, yes, in the Spiegeltent. Each evening is book-ended by two variety shows. There’s Bob and Willsy in Adelaide Tonight, the variety show at 6pm, and then late at night it’s Club Cumming. Variety, to me, is literally the spice of life. I love how you can adapt it to whoever’s in tonight, whoever can sing a song, tell jokes, read some poetry. Especially late at night when people have had a few drinks.

I love the idea of someone crazy coming up on stage. The audience as well. I want that to be a part of the whole thing. At Club Cumming [Alan’s infamous cabaret venue in New York] we have this thing in the bar where anything can happen and I love that. Anyone can come up and you don’t know what’s going to happen. Or you don’t know if you’re gonna be dancing on a table at any minute.

You’ve got the right name for a queer entertainer. Me too. With the surname Horner all my emails end up in spam folders. Same for you?

[Laughs]. Totally! Always!

Have agents, managers, PRs tried to dissuade you from using your surname so fragrantly, er, flagrantly?

[Laughs.] Fragrantly! [He laughs again.] You mean my men’s fragrance! You have to be quite well-known before you can make a joke of your own name and I wouldn’t have people in my life who didn’t get me. As you get older you just think if people don’t get who I am and what I’m after we shouldn’t be working together. Some people I work with don’t understand it but they get me, they like me, they trust me. I’m a big boy. I’m not going to be told what to do. Certainly not now. Too late for that.

Your detective show, Instinct, now in its second season, is a real ground breaker. The lead character is gay, with the wardrobe and husband to prove it. How hard was it to get it off the ground?

One of the executives at CBS was very behind it. Sadly, he left and we lost our champion – that’s probably why it didn’t get a third season. You don’t imagine a network like CBS doing a show like that but it really came from them. James Patterson has written something like one in every 15 books sold in the US – it’s fuckin’ insane. He had a deal with CBS and he’d written this book about a gay cop and he pushed it to them.

It’s shocking that there hadn’t been another network drama with a gay leading character. It was fun to be in a ridiculous cop show. I told people it wasn’t naturalistic. I mean, in the first episode of season 2, the murderer is frozen alive in his own cryogenic chamber. It’s not exactly crack on the streets. I really enjoyed the heightened camp. Also, I just loved that it was happening and that people were talking about. It was important to me. And I love the fact that my husband on it, Dan [Daniel Ings as Andy], a lovely actor, was 20 years younger than me and nobody ever mentioned that. [Laughs]. Hilarious.

Your role as Eli, the political advisor on The

Good Wife, was pure gold. Did you ever feel you made him too cold, too cynical, too calculating, too inhuman?

No, I didn’t. I went into it not knowing what I was doing and the writers didn’t know either. They flung things at me and I’d do something. It was like a game of tennis and eventually we were way up there. He’d do and say ridiculous things and it just seemed to work because we’d set him up to be that kind of guy, a coiled spring. No, I never worry about going too far. If you get it wrong you get it wrong.

The irony, of course, is that in light of US politics he wasn’t that unrealistic.

Totally! Oh my God, his views foreshadowed so much. I thought I knew the US; I thought I got how it worked. Suddenly, I’m doing this show in Chicago and I realised I didn’t understand Chicago. It’s completely different. It’s like the Wild West. There are people there who wear their corruption on their sleeve as a badge of honour! Once I got that, I realised you could do pretty much anything. While we were filming there was that crazy Chicago mayor who was jailed. In fact, something like three out of the last five Chicago governors have gone to jail. Yes, it’s a crazy place.

[Six Illinois governors have been charged with crimes during or after their governorships and four have been convicted, one of whom was impeached and removed from office.]

You’re doing your own show on the final night of the festival, Alan Cumming Is Not Acting

His Age – what age are you acting?

[Smiles.] I’ll have to work that out. Definitely not 56, it would appear! I haven’t finished writing the show yet. I just finished another book and the show’s next. I know the areas I’ll talk about and I’m honing song choices. It’s also good to be flexible and spontaneous but with a sound structure to improvise around.

What will you be taking aim at?

Firstly, the whole notion of being “age appropriate”. Why have we become so conditioned to thinking that something is not appropriate? I’m allowed not to act my age because I’m crazy Alan Cumming but the average 56-year-old man shouldn’t be doing some of the things I do. At least, in people’s minds. I want to explore that and why we’re so governed by what others think.

You’re famous for your cutting comments, but the unkindest cut of all is the circumcision of baby boys. Why would anyone, male or female, gay or straight, prefer a penis that’s been hacked to within an inch of its life?

That queerness, openness and sprinkling of glitter over everything is exactly what cabaret should do.

[Exasperated] I… Don’t… Know… You’re asking the wrong person. On so many levels it’s a terrible thing to do. When I first came to America and was having a fun time and showing my penis to lots of people, I was shocked by how they’d look at it and say, “What’s that?!” [Laughs] “What does that do?!” And I’d say, “Why, what do you mean?!”

It was really weird. I was just me. Here’s my body. It’s always been the same. This is what other people look like where I come from. And suddenly people were pointing at a bit of it, a very important bit of it to a man, and saying I was weird!

That’s what started me off. “There’s another mind-fuck,” I thought. People have been so conditioned to thinking that being circumcised is normal and being intact is not. I just don’t get it. I’ll be mentioning that in my show as well. There will be mentions of my “intactivism”. And the hypocrisy of it when it’s done to girls. Genital mutilation is horrible and countries are rightly sanctioned for it but with boys, in supposedly forward-leaning, supposedly progressive countries, it’s just ignored and if you object to it you’re seen as kind of slightly weird.

Sure, it’s been changing in the last 10 or 15 years but still the things that people say are hilarious. The other day someone said, “Alan, I saw you on a talk show and

I was thinking about having our little boy circumcised but because of what you said we didn’t.”

Every time I win a foreskin, when I’ve saved a little boy’s foreskin, I’ve saved him all that traumatic experience and I’ve saved all his nerve endings, it’s a huge, huge win for me, and a great pleasure, and a great achievement.

I’m always shocked when people say a doctor told them they should circumcise their son because otherwise he’ll be teased in the lockerroom. Or the father wants it done to his son so he’ll look like him – that’s hilarious. Is that something they do in America? They go home and compare penises? It’s just so shocking to me. I don’t understand it. I’ll definitely talk about in my show. •