Thank God for Alan Cumming. Seriously. Thank God.
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It’s so refreshing to see a performer who is 100% in control of their talents and appeal and able to deploy them effortlessly and uniquely in a variety of scenarios. Alan Cumming is one such performer and his stunning cabaret, “Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs”, was a virtuosic delight.
The Tony-winner sang a 90-minute set on Saturday night in the yawning Music Box space at Atlantic City’s Borgata Hotel and Casino accompanied by pianist and arranger Lance Horne and cellist Eleanor Norton. It should come as no surprise that Alan Cumming is a cabaret natural. The versatile Scottish performer has spent years stalking about the Studio 54 stage as the M.C. in Kander and Ebb’s Broadway hit, Cabaret. But whereas the role required that the actor use his androgynous appeal and powerful voice as an artifice, obfuscating any hint of genuine emotion, Cumming the cabaret star is arrestingly vulnerable. Over the course of 13 covers and nearly as many interstitial stories, the audience was moved to tears of laughter and melancholy by a performer who seemed eager to point out life’s brightest spots as well as it’s darkest. He’s was like a one-man Chekhov play by way of the Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack.
“Sappy songs,” it turns out, is a fairly wide category. So, while he began the night by warning “you should have a hanky ready” before launching into a perfect rendition of Annie Lennox’s pleading soul hit “Why,” he quickly skipped to “Somewhere Only We Know” by Keane and Miley Cyrus’ “The Climb.” In between, he explained that he’d chosen the evening’s songs simply because he liked them and the tightly scripted cabaret bore out his genuine affection. Effortlessly veering from talking about his Grandfather’s battle with PTSD to, minutes later, telling a ribald story about filming a commercial for Trojan condoms with Ricki Lake, Cumming proved time and again that he is the perfect artist to be doing what he does. At once cheeky and revealing, he is beguiling storyteller and a fine interpreter of songs.
Still trim at 50, with a loose physicality and a louche demeanor, he is at once wolfish and gamine. It is no surprise that one of his best stories is a surprising affecting gambit about having the tattooed name of an ex removed from his crotch. There’s something truly magical about Cumming’s ability to transform the salacious into sentiment. And vice versa. The evening is expertly pitched, never dipping too far into melancholy nor rising too high into comedy. To wit, his story about the crotch tattoo is situated between Rufus Wainwright’s achingly beautiful “Dinner at 8” and Avril Lavigne’s aching “Complicated.” And it all works.
He then closed with the one-two punch of Billy Joel’s “And So It Goes” and Sondheim’s “Ladies Who Lunch.” Fascinatingly, neither song is a perfect fit for his voice or style but, as with all of his other selections, worked beautifully in the moment. Prior to the final two songs, the evening climaxed in the way that all good cabarets should: with a story about Liza Minelli that has to be heard live to be fully appreciated. As he did with the culminating songs, and indeed the whole happy-sad evening, this masterful performer was able to conjure a unique moment of theatrical magic that shimmered brilliantly for a while and then just as quickly disappeared.
