As a choice for the documentary’s frontman, Cumming was a no-brainer. Even with leading stage roles and a clutch of blockbuster movies already in the bag, his voracious, sexually omnivorous interpretation of the role of EmCee in Sam Mendes’ stage revival of Cabaret, first in 1993 at London’s Donmar Warehouse, then five years later on Broadway in New York, marked a definitive gear-change in both his career and public persona. It also marked the moment he found his new home, and the start of a mutual love affair with New York that was quickly sealed with a Tony, a Drama Desk, an Outer Critics’ Circle and pretty much every other theatre award going. (It’s classic Cumming cheek that, where you or I might banter limply with transatlantic counterparts about the difference between chips and crisps, or that your first floor is our ground floor, his crass quip on winning the Friends of New York Theatre (FANY) award, “I’ve always craved FANY,” also boasts at least three layers of witty ambiguity.)
12 years later, he’s still a New York City boy, with occasional breaks from the Manhattan home he shares with Shaffer and their two dogs Honey and Leon to kick back at their cabin in the Catskills. In 2008, in the run-up to the presidential election, he decided to make it official, applying for American citizenship so that he could play his own small role in chasing off the Bush administration. “Except, I miscalculated how long the whole naturalisation process would take. I was sworn in three days after Obama won”. In his interview, Cumming was not asked if he is a terrorist. “But,” he grins, “I did get asked if I was a prostitute for some reason.”
A test is taken based on a list of 100 questions given to applicants in advance, of which each is asked ten. (“How many amendments does the Constitution have?” Answer, 27. “Name one state that borders Canada”. Of 13 correct options, Washington, Minnesota or Maine. “Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?” Thomas Jefferson.) To pass, a prospective citizen must get six right. “After the first six questions, the evaluator asked me (puts on a game show host voice), ‘You have six out of six right. Do you want to go for ten?’ It was hilarious.” Cumming, incidentally, hit a perfect score. Swot.
Another task is to prove you can write in English. Cumming was asked to write down the sentence “I bought a blue car today”. “It seems a sweet little line,” he said afterwards, “but it’s about consumerism and gas-guzzling. It’s a terrible sentence.” In a typical example of his taste for playful provocation, a smiling finger to his new homeland, it also became the title of his next project, an eclectic, stripped-down musical cabaret which he toured from New York to London via LA, Dallas, and Sydney Opera House last winter. A loose, evolving collection of songs drawing on the canons of Frank Sinatra, Cyndi Lauper, Dolly Parton and Mica and the score of Hedwig And The Angry Inch, I Bought A Blue Car Today was a conscious effort on Cumming’s part to once more catapult himself beyond his comfort zone, as well as bringing a touch of Weimarean edge to today’s celebrity concert tour conventions.
“That whole world was much more politically biting. We’re more into the cult of personality and celebrity now. I think it’s quite interesting to explore that with a show like this. Obviously, people expect to find out more about you as a person, and they did, but through the stories about my own experiences I chose to tell, and the songs I sang, which changed as the tour, and life, progressed, I tried to maybe hark back to the Weimar a little, and tease the audience with a bit of social comment and political edge as well as just fun.”
It also allowed Cumming to notch up yet another first, spawning his first album, also called I Bought A Blue Car Today, of studio-recorded versions of featured tracks – plus his first dance remix in Rich Morel’s Pink Noise spin on Next to Me, a boozy love song Cumming wrote for his husband to a tune by the show’s musical director Lance Horne.
For the next few months, it’ll be hard to go to a cinema without seeing, or at least hearing Cumming – four slated releases will hijack his vocal cords for use by everything from a cartoon goat to ‘Gutsy Smurf’ in the forthcoming Smurfs movie, rumoured to co-star Quentin Tarantino. First up among his visible appearances, opening on April 16, is Boogie Woogie, a searing, sexed-up satire on the contemporary art scene with a starry international cast, in which Cumming plays a loser dealer who tries – doh! – to play an honest game. Burlesque, due at the end of the year, puts our hero back in nightclub world, only this time he’s the doorman, the seedy gaff belongs to Cher, and Christina Aguilera breezes in as a naïve country girl whose biiig voice just might save the day. Most interesting should be The Tempest, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s mystical swansong with Helen Mirren taking a transgender version of the Prospero role, and Russell Brand on the cast list. Direction comes from Julie Taymor, a friend of Cumming since he worked on Titus, her radical reworking of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus in 1999. They’ll soon be teaming up again, assuming the current pre-production problems with her new Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark are resolved. The superhero spectacle, with original music by Bono and The Edge and featuring Cumming as the Green Goblin, is scheduled to open later this year. It’s a project he’s particularly looking forward to, not least for some very unshowbiz reasons. “I’ll sleep in my own bed every night. That’s very, very appealing to me.”
He’ll need the rest. Equal marriage rights for LGBT people is just one of the aims on his activism agenda for the coming year, and the requests for his support for causes keep rolling in. If it involves empowering anyone who’s disempowered, he’s pretty much in. And just because he’s signed up to its citizens’ code doesn’t mean he’ll be giving his adopted home an easy ride either. “America thinks of itself as the land of the free, but freedom’s a relative term,” he says. “So many people lack freedom in the U.S.” AS spokesperson last summer for New York’s Empire State Gay Agenda, Cumming got the chance to speak to New York State’s Governor and to the Speaker of the House in the State Government “I was kind of amazed by how dodgy the lawmaking system is. Surely gay rights are a human rights issue and transcend the whole political agenda and laws they’re normally trying to put through. Someone said, ‘Oh we don’t live on your planet, Alan’. I was like, ‘Well, fuck you, too! We’re not talking about the subway, we’re talking about peoples’ rights. And how human beings are treated’. They all thought I was an airy-fairy little actor. Which, of course,” he says, with a final impish smile, “I am.”
Words by Catherine Gunderson, who has worked for Harper’s Bazaar and Esquire in the UK, and Budget Travel, O, Oprah Magazine and others in the US.
Photography by Minh Ngo, styling by Javier Lewis and grooming by Gregg Hubbard
