Cherry’s crowd pleaser is a big beast in Edinburgh’s heaving menagerie
The Glass Menagerie (King’s Theatre) Verdict: Exquisite antique ★★★★✩ Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs (The Hub) Verdict: His life is a cabaret ★★★✩✩
AMID the vast menagerie of the heaving, clattering Edinburgh Festival, Tennessee Williams’s exquisitely sad autobiographical drama from 1944 is a charmingly old-fashioned reprieve.
The production stars Cherry Jones – President Allison Taylor from the TV series 24. It isn’t the most exciting or novel of plays to headline Edinburgh’s International Festival but it is proving a copper-bottomed hit.
This is thanks largely to Jones, who plays the overbearing mother and former Southern Belle who suffocates her children with spurious memories of a Mississippi golden age. The play is a repertory classic, with the Williams character taking the audience on a journey into his past pain. Williams’s sister was diagnosed with schizophrenia and lobotomised when he wrote this and she is represented as a nervous, disabled waif who is overattached to a menagerie of ornamental glass animals.
Director John Tiffany (who directed the West End Harry Potter show) aims to give the play a modern make-over, with stylised movement, choreographed by Steven Hoggett. Hoggett’s trademark is getting actors to list to the point of almost falling over but his pseudoballetic posturing adds little. Happily, the piece survives.
IT TAKES a certain kind of nerve to organise your own tribute show, but Alan Cumming has that nerve, in spades.
Scotland’s answer to Liza Minnelli, Cumming, 51, is well known for having played the Emcee in Cabaret but even better known as a wily political fixer in US TV’s The Good Wife.
Returning to Scotland, now the series has ended, Cumming has resolved to reveal glimpses of his more intimate self in a late-night rendition of what he admits are ‘sappy songs’ – ranging from Annie Lennox’s Keep Your Big Mouth Shut, to an inevitable (and inevitably fond) Sondheim spoof.
The whiff of self-indulgence is strong but the songs are at least unusual as Cumming performs in a black sleeveless shirt with baggy trousers, backed by a similarly black-clad band, in a former church at the foot of the castle.
His song selection bookends anecdotes from his life, starting with his humble origins in small town Aberfeldy. And if he gives a little too much detail about his sex life, he is careful to maintain his Peter Pan facade and never let the evening get too deep or meaningful.