Alan Cumming: Och and Awe
Alan Cumming lets us in on his unlikely friendship and onstage partnership with bosom buddy Ari Shapiro.
Somewhere between Paris and London, British Airways lost Alan Cumming’s luggage, and, now waylaid in an airport hotel, the award-winning actor-writer-singer-producer is stuck. “I’m doing this travel show and I’ve got all these suits that I wear in one of the bags,” he tells me over a Zoom call. “I wonder what will I do?”
To his credit, and despite the day’s comedy of errors — someone from the hotel briefly interrupts to deliver coffee pods for Cumming’s coffeemaker, but they’re the wrong pods for his machine — Cumming remains in bright spirits whether talking about reviving Och & Oy!: A Considered Cabaret, his show with pal Ari Shapiro, or giving the rundown on his latest TV travelogue.
“It’s a show where I go and meet people who’ve built their dream homes,” Cumming shares. “I’ve been to the Sound of Mull in the west coast of Scotland, Liguria in Italy. That was stunning. Sicily in Italy. I’ve just been to Normandy, Northern Ireland. Then I go to Sweden, go to London, and do some press, actually, for A Strange Loop. A Strange Loop‘s opening in London, and so I’m doing a little interview about that as a producer.”
Between touring for stage performances, film and TV productions, and as a Renaissance man of the world, this Scot based in New York really gets around.
“I hate losing my luggage, but I like going to all these different places and meeting all these nutty people,” he says. “So many crazy people in the world. And I’m good at getting people to open up and reveal things. It’s a skill I’ve always had. People are always telling me the most dreadful secrets.”
Asked the secret to his and Shapiro’s sparkling onstage chemistry in Och & Oy!, Cumming has little to reveal. “I don’t know, I just think people quite like the idea of the two of us. People get it. I think people get that we’re having some fun with our own images. And they’ve certainly turned out. We’ve been fine for audiences.”
The two close friends met first as subject and interviewer, at a Sixth & I Historic Synagogue event featuring Cumming discussing his book of photography and stories You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams with NPR host and journalist Shapiro.
“You get interviewed by people all the time,” Cumming recalls, “but it’s nice when you do one of those nights where it’s someone who’s not just giving you softball questions and who challenges you, and it’s a conversation. He didn’t let me get away with anything. I liked that.”
Soon after, the pair of modern gay icons met for another onstage interview, for the Newseum’s Rise Up exhibit marking the 50th anniversary of Stonewall. “As we were walking off stage from that, I said, ‘Gosh, Ari, we are really good at this. We’ve got good energy, we should do a show together.’ And he said, ‘Don’t tease me. If you mean it, I’d love to. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.’”
Thus was born Och & Oy!, the show’s title a slang reference to Cumming’s and Shapiro’s respective Scottish and Jewish heritage. The pair debuted their cabaret of songs and funny stories, shaped with an assist from musical director and pianist Henry Koperski, in Provincetown, naturally, followed by a run in Fire Island. “And we’ve been doing it ever since, bobbing about here and there,” says Cumming. “And it’s such a fun thing to do.”
It’s fun for the audience, too, as Cumming and Shapiro trip gaily through an eclectic setlist of standards, pop, and showtunes, while trading turns telling tales. Occasionally, a funny yarn winds into a comic song, like the delightful “Taylor, the Latte Boy,” a tune most famously recorded by Cumming’s Schmigadoon! co-star Kristin Chenoweth.
Cumming leaves much of the song selection to Shapiro, who’s had his share of stage experience performing with the band Pink Martini.
“Ari made up that initial musical medley thing. I’m not very good at all that,” Cumming admits. “I mean, I didn’t really know the songs we were parodying. That was like Schmigadoon! as well. For the first season, I had no idea which musicals we were supposedly parodying at which time. I liked them all, but I just couldn’t work out what was what.”
He’s the one with two Tonys for his work in musical theater, but Cumming insists Shapiro is “much more knowledgeable about musicals and things than I am. He and Henry and my assistant Ethan, they just geek out on musicals when we’re on tour. I feel like the little straight boy in the corner.”
This month, the duo are reviving their musical odyssey for a pair of performances, at the Zeiterion Performing Arts Center in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and at Maryland Hall in Annapolis, presented by Rams Head OnStage. The engagements coincide with Pride Month celebrations around the country, a time for revelry and reflection that Cumming acknowledges stirs mixed feelings for him.
“Up until this year, it has felt to me that [Pride], something that started off as a demonstration and a rallying call, has evolved into just a party,” Cumming observes. “And I think we’ve lost sight of what was at the core of it.”
But this year, with dragons breathing down the necks of LGBTQ people, Cumming feels somewhat differently. “I think because of what’s happened in America this year, and other parts of the world, it’s coming back to that original thing of it being a demonstration, and galvanizing the queer community to be vigilant and to keep fighting, and to make people aware of all these terrible things that are happening,” he says.
“I sort of wish that we didn’t have to have Pride. I wish we didn’t have to have a month that we get to be ourselves. And it feels like such a gesture, like, ‘Oh, thank you, the rest of the world, for noticing us and saying you support us, in this month.’ I don’t like that. I feel that we should just be able to be ourselves and be proud all the time, not just in a month.
“But then I also feel that there are people who don’t have the kind of life I have and don’t live in a big city and travel, and don’t get the opportunity to be themselves and to live as openly or as in such a way of celebration, or to wear crazy things and to just be gay, gay, gay in their lives. And so for them, I think it’s really important and it should be a party and a celebration, and this is part of the year that they get to do that.”
Och and Oy! A Considered Cabaret plays Saturday, June 24 at Zeiterion Performing Arts Center, in New Bedford, Ma., and Sunday, June 25 at Maryland Hall, in Annapolis, Md. Tickets at Zeiterion are $49 to $69, and at Maryland Hall, $55 to $100. For tickets and info, please visit www.ramsheadonstage.com or www.zeiterion.org.
To keep up with Alan Cumming, visit www.alancumming.com.
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