Come to His ‘Cabaret’

Few actors would have the temerity to step into a role that had won both a Tony and an Oscar for the person who created it, but Alan Cumming, who is playing the Emcee in the new Broadway revival of “Cabaret,” is nothing if not fearless. Indeed, he’s quick to raise the name of Joel Grey, “because everyone is going to, anyway.”

“I think the film is fantastic,” he adds, his large dark eyes, white skin, and soft Scottish burr betraying his Highlands background. “But in the midst of all this debauchery, he [Grey] looked rather asexual, this kind of strange, weird creature pulling away from it all. I don’t. I’m part of the orgy. I’m shocking the audience, saying ‘Come on, you’ll love this,’ then being nice some, then shocking them more--too much--and then doing something nice again. I’m really cheeky.”

When Cumming, 33, says “cheeky” he means it literally. In one of the more outrageous scenes in director Sam Mendes’ raunchy reinvention of the John Kander-Fred Ebb musical, he moons the audience to reveal a bright red swastika tattooed on his behind. It’s that kind of revival. And that kind of performance.

Indeed Cumming’s alluring anarchic presence is rarely absent in this “environmental” staging of a musical about a not-so-innocent American writer (John Benjamin Hickey) visiting 1930s Berlin and stumbling into a deliciously decadent caldron of social and political ferment in the waning days of the Weimar Republic. Performed in a midtown Manhattan theater that has been transformed into a nightclub, the show ensnares the audience as stand-ins for the patrons of the Kit Kat Klub. And it is Cumming who acts as the tantalizing, bisexual guide to a world where Sally Bowles (Natasha Richardson) and the Kit Kat chorus boys and girls, tattooed arms lined with needle tracks and eyes smeared with kohl, dance on the edge of a volcano.

Even when the action switches to the boarding house where Herr Schultz, a Jewish fruit merchant (Ron Rifkin), is romancing the landlady, Fraulein Schneider (Mary Louise Wilson), Cumming presides over the scene, his expression alternating between sweetness and mockery. As the omniscient Emcee, he even manages to steal one of Sally Bowles’ songs, “I Don’t Care Much,” singing it in beaded gown with utter seriousness.

‘He watches everything,” says Cumming. “The ambiguity--sexually, emotionally, politically--is where he stands in the whole thing and it’s all a joke to him, but he’s a part of it. To me, he’s a real person, the bad angel on your shoulder luring you in. You know, sometimes, you meet people and think, ‘You are trouble, you are really trouble.’ He’s trouble, but he’s also a showman.”

An apt description of Cumming himself, as well, as it turns out. Sitting at his makeup table in his cluttered dressing room earlier this month, before the show opened, the willowy actor, who has homes in London and Scotland, comes across as an intriguing mixture of a naive “wee boy”--to use his words--and the sassy, elegant sophisticate who is winning new fans in his Broadway debut. Madonna invited him to dinner after catching the show in previews and Mikhail Baryshnikov was a willing victim at one performance when, at the top of the second act, the Emcee picks someone from the audience to dance with him.

“I see you’ve done this before,” Cumming ad-libbed to the dancer.

Cumming’s seductive manner offstage is rather more subtle. He welcomes one into his cubbyhole dressing room during his dinner break, between matinee and evening performances, with talk about his redecorating schemes. The place is still something of a mess even after the theater, a dive that had been used as a rock club, has been transformed into the Kit Kat Klub for “Cabaret.” In between bites of carry-out sushi, Cumming proudly points to the Ginger Spice doll on his dressing table and shows off his life-size cardboard cutout of the Spice Girls, with whom he co-starred in “Spice World” as the documentary filmmaker.

“A friend of mine stole it, isn’t it lovely?” he says, noting that he intends to fasten it to the ceiling above his cot so he can wake up to it. Pointing to a collage of photos of friends and family, he adds, “and here’s a picture of Gerry Spice and me. She’s doing me as Hamlet and I’m doing her as Gerry Spice. I love the Spice Girls!”

Equally at home doing Shakespearean classics as cavorting in silly movies, the young actor boasts an impressively eclectic resume. He’s done stand-up comedy, worked regularly with such prestigious repertory companies as the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Court, wrote and/or directed shorts and television sitcoms, and has appeared in more than a dozen feature films: as the villainous hacker in “GoldenEye,” Chris O’Donnell’s creepy rival in “Circle of Friends,” the geek-turned-prince in “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” the ardent Mr. Elton in “Emma” and the chimp-loving assistant in “Buddy.”

Hardly a snob when it comes to picking his projects, he freely admits that “financial gain” is sometimes the bait. But more often than not, he says, “fear and the wish not to be bored” are more useful incentives for him. He recalls that one of the high points of a nine-month stay in West Hollywood during filming of “Romy and Michele,” was appearing as a guest onstage with the improv group the Groundlings, along with his friend and co-star Lisa Kudrow.

“It was just great to get a real taste of that terror again,” he says.

Terror, too, was what he felt when he assayed the role that put him on the fast track to acting greatness in Britain, moving some critics there to mention his name in the same breath as Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. In 1992, at age 28, he played “Hamlet” in the English Touring Company production at the Donmar Warehouse, the experimental venue where Mendes serves as artistic director.

“One of the best Hamlets you are likely to see,” said the Financial Times of his performance. In fact, it was just after finishing “Hamlet” that Mendes tagged Cumming for his revival of “Cabaret,” which opened in 1993 at the Donmar to rave reviews. (For the New York production, Mendes is sharing co-directing credit with choreographer Rob Marshall.)

Cumming was reluctant at first. “I was exhausted and quite bonkers from playing ‘Hamlet,’ and I didn’t really think it was my thang,” he says, mimicking an American accent, as he’s wont to do from time to time. “I’m not too keen on musicals.” But Cumming said that he read “The Berlin Stories,” the 1935 novella by Christopher Isherwood that inspired John van Druten’s 1952 play “I Am a Camera,” which in turn became the basis for Joe Masteroff’s book for “Cabaret.” He then turned to “Christopher and His Kind,” Isherwood’s 1976 memoir, which was much more graphic and explicit in exploring the characters and events of Berlin’s 1930s underbelly.

“Once I realized we weren’t going to do some kind of predictable, sanitary version of the musical, I was quite keen to take on the challenge.”

While Cumming observes that there are few things the Emcee does that Cumming wouldn’t do offstage--”I’m really quite adventurous in my personal life, I’m quite a sexual person,” he says--he admits nonetheless that the role does not come easy. He thinks of the character, after all, as a failed hustler who could easily have fallen through the net, been beaten up and left for dead in some alley, had he not ended up at the Kit Kat Klub.

But the urbaneness of the character is not really in line with Cumming’s background. Indeed, when the actor says that he’s happy to be doing what he’s doing rather than “working a tractor,” he’s not joking. Cumming grew up on a rural estate in Scotland; his strict, forbidding father was a worker on the place. Cumming describes his upbringing as “weird,” and is reluctant to talk about it, though he will admit that it was such a volatile and repressive atmosphere that he wanted to get out at the earliest opportunity. “When I played Hamlet, he was very close to who I was then--angry, having a bit of breakdown, crying a lot, desperate to get away from home,” he says. “People say that I now have a childish border, but that’s because I always had to be so grown-up as a child.”

Cumming’s escape came when he enrolled in his late teens at the Royal Scottish Academy for Music and Drama, having discovered as a child that he had a talent for mimicry and playacting. At 23, he came to London’s Royal Court to play the leather-jacketed leader of a group of unemployed boys in “The Conquest of the South Pole,” a play that had opened at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh and for which he was nominated for an Olivier award in the London production as “Best Newcomer.”

His range is such that long before he started playing villains, he was the wholesome poster boy for Lee jeans. But he much prefers the “sleazy, angst-ridden” roles, like the “posh, debauched boy” he plays in the upcoming film “Plunkett and Macleane,” co-starring Jonny Lee Miller and Robert Carlyle, or his brief scene in the Stanley Kubrick film “Eyes Wide Shut,” in which he plays a weird hotel clerk with a shine for Tom Cruise.

The Emcee in “Cabaret” is also not the first time he’s excavated the ghosts of World War II, playing the lead in “Prague,” an Alexander Novak film about a young man trying to find a piece of film that shows his Jewish family being led off to their deaths. He is also the star of the soon-to-be released “For My Baby” by the Dutch director Rudolf van den Berg, which he describes as a “Dybbuk”-like tale about a Jewish stand-up comedian who is slowly taken over by the ghost of his sister who died in a concentration camp. In one scene, dressed in drag as the sister, he visits his mother, who is in a coma in a hospital. In Europe, ghosts are much more palpable than here, Cumming says. “You can get on a train and take the same trip that ended with people being pushed onto trucks and taken off to the death camps. It infects the air.”

Cumming says he loves mining the “subterranean emotions” behind the deceptive surface calm of “normality” that people project in their lives. In fact, he adds, one of the things that attracted him to this production of “Cabaret” is the way that it upsets preconceptions, especially in the stunning reversal of fortune which his character undergoes at the finale. The tumult of events and emotions above which he rides for most of the play ultimately engulf him as well.

Though with a far different approach, he tackled the same theme of human frailty in “Butter,” the short film he wrote and directed a couple of years ago, about a woman who has a severe eating disorder but who to all outward appearances is a cheerful, outgoing person. If he has particular sympathy for freaks and outsiders, it is because he has always felt like one.

Just walking down the street, he says, he seems to invite the strangest responses from people who recognize him from “Cabaret” or his films. “People invade my space, even physically, touching me and the like,” he says. “More so in London than here in New York, because everyone is a bit odd here.”

That even more fame may complicate his life is a bit scary to Cumming, who says that he is at a crossroad in his personal life, assessing “how I’ve lived and how I’m going to live.” He’s a bit cynical about romance and personal relationships, having been burned in love affairs that he thought were going to last forever.

“I guess I’m cautious now,” he says. “Trying to live a life that will accommodate all your needs and not hurt people and achieve what it is you want to achieve. As Sally Bowles says in ‘Cabaret,’ ‘You can’t truly be a great actress until you’ve had several passionate affairs and had your heart broken.’ I think it’s true.”

Right now, Cumming says he just wants to live up to how he is identified on his green card, the official permit that allows him to work as an artist in the United States. “It says that I’m an alien of extraordinary ability. How’s that for billing?”

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* “Cabaret,” Kit Kat Klub, 124 W. 43rd St., New York. $50-$75. (800) 432-7250.