I premiered my new cabaret show in Adelaide, Australia on the closing night of the cabaret festival there. I next performed it at the Edinburgh International Festival.
Here’s the blurb from the Edinburgh International Festival brochure about it:
What exactly is acting your age? And who decides? These are the questions Alan Cumming has been grappling with for a very long time.
‘I’m constantly told, even now in my sixth decade, that I am childlike or puckish, and yet at the same time I’m also called a silver fox and a daddy,’ he says. ‘I think we all get really mixed messages about ageing. We’re told to worship at the fountain of youth, to do everything we can to our bodies and our minds to stay young, yet we bandy around pejoratives like “grow up” or “act your age”, even that we’re “mutton dressed as lamb”.’
Cumming, at fifty-six, is enjoying himself. ‘I feel I’m still at an age where I can dance till dawn, but also be able to dole out some wisdom to my fellow revellers! Wisdom is just being able to recognise the repeating patterns that emerge as you get older and maybe deciding to react to them differently. It’s just the same show with different costumes.’
In Alan Cumming Is Not Acting His Age, he covers all the bases: sex, death and bacchanalia, with a set list as eclectic as the man himself. Songs from Cabaret authors[LA1] John Kander and Fred Ebb blend with contemporary favourites and even a self-penned paean against plastic surgery. ‘I am literally the only person on American TV who has not had Botox!’ he quips. He also discusses the effects of gravity, the time the mum from The Brady Bunch punched him in the stomach and what his dog taught him about the quality of life.
“In the underpopulated arena of male cabaret singers, Mr. Cumming may be the only one with the talent and drive to change its direction.” The New York Times
“So hilarious, flirty and gorgeously filthy that it's hard to decide if you want him as a new best friend or a lover.” Sydney Morning Herald
“The androgynous imp is both quiet and uproarious, adorable and sensual, flippant and emotional, otherworldly and inviting...this is precisely why he's an icon to behold - he is unapologetically himself, and with a talent like that, he has no need to apologize.” Billboard