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[title]Update, Dec 8 2021: This article was originally published in June 2021. The tour has been rescheduled to June 2022.
Alan Cumming no longer has a publicist. You might think that’s because this mercurial force of spritely energy is already everywhere. After all, he’s appeared in blockbuster movies like X-Men 2, hit TV shows like The Good Wife, and a fistful of Shakespeare plays on the stage. He’s published best-selling memoirs and novels and hosted club nights in New York. He was just in Australia to head up the 2021 Adelaide Cabaret Festival, and after it was rudely resceduled by lockdowns, he's heading on a national tour with solo show Alan Cumming is Not Acting his Age in 2022. It takes in Sydney’s Enmore Theatre and the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.
And it probably is a bit of all this, but mostly it’s because you can’t put this genie back in the bottle. You can’t tell him what to do, or what not to say on Twitter. And for heaven’s sake, don’t snatch his drink away when a photographer wants a snap at a glitzy party. “That drives me fucking nuts,” he cackles mischievously in his lilting Glasgow brogue. “I always grab it back and say, ‘never do that again’. I always make a point of having a drink in my hand. Don’t take pictures at parties then. Just do the Red Carpet.”
The thing about ageing is you give less of a fuck, you really do. Let’s put things in perspective of what’s important in the world
If this reads diva, that’s really not the sense you get from the endlessly delightful Cumming. He’s just at a stage in his life where what you see is what you get, and he's not about to photoshop that for anyone. “The thing about ageing is you give less of a fuck, you really do,” he says. “Let’s put things in perspective of what’s important in the world. Just dance to the tacky pop song. You know you want to. Sing along to The Little Mermaid. You know the words. Don’t worry about people judging you.”
The proudly bisexual megastar will not fit neatly and tidily into any box. Speaking of early attempts to pin him down, he recalls widespread confusion in the media. “What are you? You’ve got to be one or the other. You’re confusing us with your first you’re with a girl, and now you’re with a guy, and then you’re with a girl again. What the fuck? Now you’re getting married to a man. What’s going on?”
Binary, black and white readings of sexuality never worked for Cumming. He's always been most comfortable in with shades of grey. “Now we really embrace the concept of fluidity within gender and sexuality,” he says, though he reckons the term would have made him chuckle back then. “But that’s kind of what I was talking about. There was a lot of fluidity going on, let me tell you.”
I don’t sing like a crooner. If you want to really connect with an audience, you’ve got to sing as who you are and be authentic
It’s the central philosophy of Not Acting his Age. If you’ve ever seen him in full cabaret flow, you’ll know to expect hilariously candid asides about his remarkable life, and an eclectic array of songs delivered in a very un-Broadway style. “I don’t sing like a crooner,” he says, affecting that overtly stagey pronunciation. “If you want to really connect with an audience, you’ve got to sing as who you are and be authentic.”
Nor will it be a dirge of slow-burn torch songs, with the times we live in calling for some of his trademark sparkly sass. Whitney Houston definitely features. “It’s funny, when I sang all the songs together before I left America, I realised that they are all quite upbeat. I mean, there’s some sad ones, but I’m quite chirpy with my stories and I realised that was something obviously that I needed, and I felt that audiences might need too.”
You have Spotify’s random playlist to thank for his rendition of Lauren Bacall’s ‘But Alive’, lifted from the musical version of classic movie All About Eve. “The first line is ‘I feel groggy and weary and tragic, punchy and bleary and fresh out of magic, but alive, but alive, but alive’. That’s a great song to express how everything feels right now.”
He spent most of last year holed up at home in a forest clearance in the Catskills with husband Grant Shaffer but did travel a bit for work, so he’s a dab hand at handling hotel quarantine by now. So much so he’s taken on way too many projects. “The good thing is to stay busy, so I have a big backlog of things to get through and, I haven’t actually quite done everything that I was supposed to,” he confesses.
Cumming has certainly developed an appreciation for downtime in this last year or so. With life returning to close to normal back in upstate New York, the couple loved hosting friends for a weekend. “It felt so easy and quick to get back to normal, talking to someone at your dining table and hugging them. And it was a really good weekend, but at the end of that I thought, ‘I didn’t get enough time for me this weekend,’ and that’s something that I’ve got to be really aware of.”
It takes a lot to be the razzmatazz man, with the off switch more important than ever. But Australian audiences will get plenty of showtime. It’s not his first rodeo down under, making his Down Under debut on tour in 1989. “My first date [outside of the UK] was the Lincoln Centre in New York, and my second date was the Sydney Opera House so, you know, start small,” he chuckles at his charmed life so far, and boy are we lucky to have him back.
You can book tickets to see Alan Cumming is Not Acting his Age here.
Cumming also just released his new memoir, Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life.