Alan CUMMING
Edinburgh International Festival Alan Cumming Is Not Acting His Age Old College Quad
★★★★★
The multiple award-winning Scottish thespian Alan Cumming is acclaimed equally as an actor on stage and screen. He is also, as audiences for his 2016 Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) show Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs can attest, a fine cabaret singer and raconteur.
It is in this latter role, as vocalist and teller of tales, that he returned to the EIF stage with a new show titled Alan Cumming Is Not Acting His Age.
Known for his performances as Emcee in the great musical Cabaret,
Cumming has created an evening of reflections on ageing that cries out for a nightclub setting.
The 56-year-old is, he said, comfortable with the wisdom that comes with getting older. To prove it, he offered wonderfully fervent renderings of such classics from the American songbook as Is That All There Is? and It Was a Good Time.
As he did so, I couldn’t help feeling we should have been sitting at candlelit tables in a cabaret club, being served cocktails as the clock ticked towards midnight. Instead, the show was being played at 7pm to a socially distanced audience seated at the EIF’S Covid-conscious luxury gazebo in the Old College Quad of Edinburgh University. It was, Cumming commented, looking up at the transparent plastic over our heads, “like playing inside an ice cube”.
Ever the professional, however, and backed by a fine four-piece band, he performed the musical numbers with, by turns, tremendous gusto and contemplative emotion. As for his storytelling, it was conducted with exactly the same kind of candour and humour that one would have expected in more intimate surroundings.
There was a tale of Paul Mccartney accompanying Emma Stone and Billie Jean King to Club Cumming – the actor’s very own venue in the East Village of Manhattan – for an evening that ended with Cumming and Stone singing, while Mccartney (who was resting his voice after a concert) accompanied on harmonica. There was also a hilarious, self-deprecating story about Cumming returning the wrong watch to a one-night-stand who had left his timepiece in the house Cumming was living in while making a movie in Los Angeles.
The actor talked with genuine emotion about his friend, the late Sean Connery, with whom he shared a long-standing commitment to Scottish independence. Cumming’s memory of a very rude remark the James Bond actor made about the Labour Party is both extremely funny and too vulgar for publication in a family newspaper.
Most of Cumming’s anecdotes are autobiographical. However, there is in them too much warmth, honesty and vulnerability for them to be dismissed simply as the tales of an egotist.
The actor’s latest contribution to the art of cabaret was a sometimes touching, often funny and disarmingly frank theatrical evening. It’s just a pity that, being housed in an expensive, pandemic-responsive tent, the show looked somewhat like a proverbial fish out of water.
One of Cumming’s anecdotes involved Mccartney, Billie Jean King and a harmonica