How is it you know Alan Cumming? Is it as the sharp if shifty political consultant Eli Gold on The Good Wife and The Good Fight? The polished announcer who opens up Masterpiece Mystery! on PBS? The Tony Award-winning emcee in the Broadway revival of Cabaret? The mayor from Schmigadoon! The host of the reality show Traitors about to start its second season on Peacock? Or is it as Fegan Floop in Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids? The Nightcrawler in X2: X-Men United?
The list is even longer than that but whatever, wherever, however you think of the Emmy, Tony and BAFTA winner, he’s ready to explain himself to you along with some songs in his show Alan Cumming is Not Acting His Age at the Hobby Center’s Zilkha Hall on March 6 and 7. The show is part of the new series launched by Broadway at the Hobby designed to have another look at artists outside of the parts they play on film, TV and stage.
“It’s all under the theme of getting older and my thoughts on aging and age appropriateness and I have little band and I sing songs about time. I tell stories. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, hopefully you’ll feel provoked and you’ll go away wanting to seize the day and be curious about life.”
Cumming was in an off-Broadway show called Daddy a few years ago. “There was a swimming pool on stage and I had to be naked a lot, completely naked. I was really fascinated about how I was objectified and how people talked about my body., the fact I was older. It was really interesting to be objectified in that way in my mid-50s.”
This got him thinking about our society’s perceptions of aging and how it was something to be avoided at all costs. “We’ve created a negative about something that is inexorable. Other cultures don’t do that. Other cultures value the elders, getting older and what that can bring.” He’s declared that he’s the only actor on American TV who hasn’t used Botox.
Cumming has toured with his band “in little spurts,” he said, around his other projects. here’s piano, drums cello and trumpet and he sings and plays a little piano. “There’s a song I wrote about plastic surgery that I start on the piano.”
When fans come up to him, he said, “I used to try to sort of scan someone when they came up to me — try to work out what they were going to say to me. Now it’s just too difficult with so many different things.” There’s a huge swath of young people that are Spy Kids because that was such a part of their childhood. That film hasn’t aged so kids still watch it. Then I’ve got the comic nerds because of X-Men. Masterpiece Theater. There’s so many things that connect so many different types of people.” Some know him from his bar Club Cumming in the East Village of Manhattan.
Early theater training helped him master the ability to do all sorts of accents, he said. ” I’m an actor and I think that’s part of your job. You have to be able to have a good ear. Fortunately I’m quite musical. At drama school we were always told that we would have to do RP [Received Pronunciation associated with middle and upper classes in Britain] because nobody would want to employ us if we sounded Scottish.
“Because of that, even though that’s a pretty sort of horrendous, self-hating kind of treatise to give to students, I think it helps. I pick things up quite quickly because of my training in the past.”
Of course every once in a while he meets someone and speaks to them in his normal Scottish accent only to be accused of putting that on.
This show allows him to absolutely be himself, which he calls very freeing.
“I talk about my feelings. I talk about things that happened to me. I am vulnerable with the audience. I tell funny stories. It’s an uplifting thing to seize life to always stay curious. I just love that journey I go on with the audience. It ends in a really great uplifting, positive way.
“I love connecting with the audience and it’s not a character, it’s you. There’s nothing like that. It’s even more satisfying than playing a character in a way.
“I love going to cities that I don’t know and meeting people and going out on the town. kind of parachuting in to bits of America that I would otherwise never go to. It’s also heartening, right now, America sort of scared me. It’s really heartening to go to places and find there are lovely, kind, sensible people who are not angry and who also believe in decency and being nice to people as I do.. I go out to the world and I’m reassured.”
Performances are scheduled for March 6 and 7 at 7 p.m. in Zilkha Hall at the Hobby Center, 800 Bagby. For more information, call 713-315-2525 or visit thehobbycenter.org. $54-$74.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
