Adelaide, Liza & f inding ME
A stellar career has taken Alan Cumming from Glasgow to the toast of London, Broadway and Hollywood. As he prepares to direct Adelaide’s Cabaret Festival, he talks to Juliet Rieden about making peace with his violent childhood, his bestie Liza Minnelli and choosing happiness.
On Instagram Cumming Twitter and describes Alan himself elf trapped as “a in Scottish the body of a middle-aged man”. It’s a brilliantly evocative epithet, but while he’s certainly a mischievous elf, I don’t see today’s Alan Cumming as trapped – and only the floppy mop of wavy grey hair hints as his advancing years. The 56-year-old actor, director, singer, writer, podcaster and cabaret club impresario is living his best life, a star of stage and screen, happily married and even in COVID-racked America finding a silver lining.
We are talking on a zoom video call and Alan has just arrived back at his home in freezing New York to film episodes of the Fox TV series Prodigal
Son. He’s full of beans but unusually a little on edge in the big smoke. “Where I am in the Catskills, we put a mask on once a week if we go in to the supermarket or if somebody comes to the door with a delivery. Just the whole thing of coming into contact with so many people has made me slightly anxious,” he says with a cheeky grin.
While he’s typically very much a city creature and revels in New York’s nightlife with his own Club Cumming a buzzing hub of fun, creativity and wicked martinis, the COVID pandemic had him heading for the mountains.
Alan was starring in a play in London when the grim reality of the new world order hit. He flew back to the US, and since he suffers from asthma has been seeking refuge in his “country house” in the Catskills which, as it turns out, became a place of fabulous hibernation.
The stunning rocky glens and lakes in central Appalachia, about 160 kilometres north of New York City, are a popular celebrity bolthole and perfect for self-imposed isolation. “I have actually really enjoyed it. I am a sociable person but I was craving what happened – not the pandemic part, but having some time out of my life, a chance to write and be in the house up in the mountains,” he explains. “I love seeing people, but I also love being isolated and being on my own and being with my husband.”
Adelaide bound
While in the Catskills, Alan has been beavering away on his next project, the 21st Adelaide Cabaret Festival. His appointment as the Festival’s first-ever international Artistic Director was proudly announced on the final day
of the online 2020 festival. “We have turned the spotlight back on to Australian artists, on cabaret in Australia and how important a form that is,” he says.
It’s a notable coup to have Alan direct the Festival. He’s the prince of cabaret – both in terms of his awardwinning performance as the Emcee in the original London stage version of Cabaret the musical – but also as the host and regular performer in his own cabaret bar in New York, Club Cumming. “The opening show of the whole festival is Bob Downe and
Willsy doing Adelaide Tonight,” explains Alan. “It couldn’t be more of a homage to homegrown stuff. It’s been really exciting for me to do because I feel such a connection to that. I first went to Australia in 1989 to do cabaret and I met Mark Trevorrow [aka Bob Downe] around about that time, so for me my understanding of cabaret and my history with it is very much bound up in Australia. The first time I went to Adelaide was in 1989 when I performed at what was then called the Summer Season.”
Alan was 24, living in Glasgow and about to move London. “I was not an international traveller then and to me it was the most exciting thing ever.” As he wandered around Adelaide, his lily-white Scottish skin blinding passers-by, Alan says he caused quite a commotion. “The ozone layer had just been discovered and people would literally stop me and point at me. One woman screeched ‘Skin cancer’ – that was all she said, and then she walked on. I felt like an alien.”
Alan was raised on a remote country estate in Angus, Scotland, where his father Alex was head forester, and his excitement for the reputedly sun-soaked land of Oz dates back to his childhood. “I remember the factor [manager] of this estate had a daughter who’d married an Australian, and as a little boy I’d hear him tell my dad that on Christmas Day they went to the beach and had a barbecue. I thought that’s the most sophisticated glamorous thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life.”
The reality more than matched
Alan’s imagined paradise. “I was there for New Year’s Eve and Australia Day and it just seemed like this magical land of plenty and people. On that trip and all the trips I’ve made since, I love the way Australians use the outdoors. There are lots of other countries which have good weather, too, but you really make it a part of your social life and I think that’s so great.”
At the Festival, which opens on June 11, following a glittering line-up of acts, Alan will be recreating his Club Cumming vibe with a mix of raucous DJ sets and hedonistic delights running to 2am. “In the Spiegeltent every night there’s a Club Cumming late night,” he explains. “Club Cumming is basically a dance party with performance cabaret. There’ll be certain acts on every night and that changes each week, but also there’s this thing of talking to the audience, bringing people up, people dropping by. The flavour of Club Cumming for me is dance-y and fun and drink-y. It’s a late night thing but it’s also about sometimes you see the most astounding things there because you don’t expect the music to stop and people to stop dancing and then you focus on someone reading poetry.”
One of the hottest tickets will certainly be Alan’s own show – Alan Cumming is Not Acting his Age
– which closes the Festival. He’s not giving much away but expect the unexpected. “Obviously there’s no age you should be. It’s only inside you that controls how you are at whatever age. The older I get, the more I seem to be either shocking or endearing people with my behaviour, and the more I think it’s an interesting thing that we’re so conditioned.”
Choosing happiness
Despite a very difficult and abusive childhood when he and his elder brother, Tom, were brutalised – physically and emotionally – by their tyrannical father, Alan tends towards optimism. He consciously chooses happiness and it shows in everything
“I just made a decision to be happy a long time ago and so I am.”
he does. “I just made a decision to be happy a long time ago and so, I am. I love my life, I love myself and if there is anything in my life that doesn’t make me happy I try to change it,” he says.
As a child it was very different. Alan lived in fear of his father’s wrath and “shutting down” was his coping mechanism. “Everything we liked or wanted or felt joy in, had to be hidden or suppressed … It will come as a shock to people who know me now, but being able to express joy was something it took me a long time to be confident enough to do, I’ve certainly made up for it since, and for this I am proud and grateful,” he wrote in the explosive 2014 memoir Not My Father’s Son in which he found the courage to dig deep.
It was something that Alan felt he had to do, but I ask him how his beloved mum – Mary Darling – and his brother Tom have coped with the world now knowing their dark family secret. “I’m looking at a picture of my
brother right now,” he says glancing over at a photograph of Tom and softly smiling. “I was very concerned about them and I let them see the book before it went to the publishers. It was published with their blessing but what’s been beautiful was that when it first came out they came with me to a lot of the launches and I saw them blossom. I’m used to scrutiny but they’re not. I saw my mum getting a round of applause at an event in Scotland, and she was so proud. For the three of us, to have something that was so shameful in our lives turned into something that we’re being applauded for having survived, was really unexpected. They got admiration for having survived and for having been supportive of me telling the story.
“So honestly it’s been a great thing for all of us. I can’t ever underestimate the power of telling your story and being your authentic self and putting that out into the world. It can do so much good, not just for you but for other people who don’t have a voice.”
At the time Alan expected pouring his heart into the book would give him “closure and wrap something up but it didn’t at all” he says. But in many ways the result is better. He has learned to live with his father still in his life and be at peace with that. “I talk about my father much more than I ever did before but I should do that because he’s my father. He’s half the reason I’m on this planet and I feel I didn’t anticipate him coming into my life again so much.
The thing that is cathartic is that I can have my father around me even though he’s not with us any more [Alex died in 2010] but it’s on my terms. I’ve allowed him back into my life.”
Turning points
While in the Catskills, Alan has also been penning a second memoir, looking back over his rise to fame from theatre success to landing big TV roles like Eli Gold in The Good Wife, fun on the set of the Spy Kids movies and tough times with X2: X-Men United. “You know you’re old when you have to research yourself to remember all the stuff that happened in your life,” he jokes.
I first saw Alan in 1993 at London’s Donmar theatre in that now legendary original production of Cabaret. It was one of the most electric pieces of musical theatre I have ever seen and I wonder if back then he had any
sense of the power of the show.
“No. Not when I first did it, not at all. I was very leery about the whole musical form. I thought this is a story about all these dreadful things that happened in history and we’re doing a musical about it – yuk! So
I was really determined to be real and authentic and gritty about what was going on. That was my big thing.”
The show and especially Alan’s performance brought out the sordid side of the Berlin cabaret scene in the 1930s as well as the vulgar brutality of rising Nazism. While it had echoes of the Liza Minnelli film and all the songs, it was deliberately harder hitting. The action was set in a cabaret club with the audience at tables and the orchestra were also actors, something which now is quite common in theatre shows but then was ground-breaking. “It wasn’t until it came to Broadway that I suddenly thought, oh wow, this is a huge deal. In a way we were reinventing a Broadway classic and it was absolutely revolutionary.”
It was also a time of flux for Alan. His acting career was hitting goals, but his head was a mess. “I was in such a state personally, and also it was such huge things that were happening to me,” he explains. “I’d done Hamlet [to critical acclaim] and Cabaret. Stuff was beginning to get a bit crazy and I was basically about to have a nervous breakdown; getting divorced, beginning to remember all the stuff about my dad … there was a lot going on for me. I remember more how difficult it was for me to get up and get to work every morning but in a way work was a relief to not have to deal with my real life. It has been interesting, writing about that, remembering all that.”
Alan became incredibly thin and, looking back, he can see it was all about control. “I was very skinny and people wanted you to be skinny – in this film they’d say, don’t put on any weight, and you begin to think, they only like me because I’m skinny. And then that becomes the only thing you can control. That’s obviously what mental health issues around food, anorexia, are based on. I totally understand that. During that time in my life – I was 28 – I was basically anorexic. Food was the only thing I was controlling in my body and I wanted to get really skinny to see how skinny I could get. It was so fascinating to me, to look back and realise I had many of those issues that young girls, indeed both sexes get. It’s rare for people in their late 20s to suddenly develop anorexia but I wasn’t very well, I wasn’t mentally in a good place.”
I ❤ New York
Cabaret, though, was Alan’s ticket to Broadway and a new beginning for him. “When I first went to New York I was in love with it and when I left London to come to do Cabaret there I sort of knew that I was never going to come back but I didn’t voice it. I wasn’t ready to say that. I love the energy and how vocal everyone is. There’s so much diversity. Every time I leave my house something exciting is going to happen.
I love that the normal is that you have adventures all the time.”
It was in New York that Alan met his husband, illustrator Grant Shaffer, through friends. They registered their civil partnership in London in 2007 and married on the five-year anniversary of that union in New York. In Grant Alan found his soulmate and the couple worked together on two charming children’s books inspired by their “dearly departed” dogs and what they get up to when Alan and Grant are not there.
And one of Alan’s earliest NYC adventures was meeting Liza Minnelli. “She came to see Cabaret [in 1998]. It was hilarious. There’s a tradition in New York where if someone like that comes, someone who’s played the part before, you have to invite them on stage.
She came back to my room afterwards and was just enchanting. I felt really comfortable with her immediately. I think of Liza as a dear, dear friend and it’s bizarre in a way because our lives are so different but I think we have a similar energy in the way we think about things. I really have a great laugh with her.”
The friendship developed into a singing partnership which Alan still pinches himself about. “First we recorded a song together on an album years ago and then we did concerts together. I’ve still got the sign that was above us on the stage, saying ‘Liza and Alan’ in lightbulbs. It was incredible. It’s one of those things: how did this happen?” AWW