Mr Cumming's solo show feels more than a little me, me, me . . .

Lights, camera, Alan!

I sometimes wonder what it must be like to have talent, the burden it must impose. The questions must always be: how do I do myself justice, what shall I do next? The obligation to do the right thing may not weigh as heavily upon an interpretive artist as a creative one, but the chances to betray it may be even greater. Lacking quite the right offer for stage or screen, the actor's temptation must be to say, "Hey, let's make my own show and put it on right here."

It is a temptation to which Alan Cumming, who made his name in Sam Mendes's memorable staging of Cabaret in 1994, succumbs in his sometimes charming (but more often irritating) one-man cabaret, I Bought a Blue Car Today (closed 6 September). The flaw is in the title. This is, apparently, a sentence that putative US citizens are asked to transcribe in their naturalisation test. Cumming, who has lived in New York since taking Cabaret there and recently took citizenship in order to vote for Barack Obama, attempts to draw significance from the sentence as an encapsulation of those twin American evils, capitalism and carbon emissions. It still sunds like a private joke, and although the show sets itself up as a celebration of his years in America, his stories are just too random to fit the theme. This is a celebration of Alan Cumming.

Not yet the legend he might hope to be, Cumming would have to labour much harder to earn this kind of honour. At worst, his anecdotes are solipsistic, at best celebrity gossip. He tells us he met the then elderly (now late) film star Ann Miller, who congratulated him on his brief appearance in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. She confessed she wished she had seen the European cut of the movie, where she believed there was "more pussy". This is an ideal Cumming story, in that it both flatters him and promulgates sexual confusion (Miller was actually married three times; Cumming has been married twice only, once to each sex). Even the great, and also late, Walter Cronkite gets to show his feminine side when Cumming recalls accidentally hauling the former anchorman on to the stage in Cabaret for a dance. The next time they met at a party, Cronkite growled: "May I have the pleasure?"

The best we can say of these slightly faltering stories is that they feel intimate. If one had not been paying for the privilege, hearing them would have been flattering. He tells us in some detail of being trapped by paparazzi in a car with the singer Mika. The next day, his husband, Grant, is shown the resulting snaps on the Perez Hilton gossip site. He is unfazed but then reads the comments underneath, which take the form of a debate about whether Cumming is being unfaithful. The to-and-fro is curtailed by a contributor who claims to have seen Cumming on his birthday with two black cocks in his mouth. Grant coolly assures the colleague who has shown him the site that he was there, and there was only the one. That, says Cumming, is why he loves Grant. Is it just me, or was that a story which, for all kinds of reasons, might have been better left for the post-show din-dins at Joe Allen's?

I wish I could say that here he launches into a heartbreaking ballad to Grant. But Cumming's choice of songs is puzzlingly obscure. The evening begins with Cyndi Lauper's would-be barnstormer "Shine" and progresses through a little-known Victoria Wood anti-love song and something unmemorable by one of André Previn's wives. When he says he will now sing something by Abba, there is an almost audible sigh of relief from the audience. But it is actually a Benny Andersson/Tim Rice/ Björn Ulvaeus number from Chess, a musical even he has no intention of seeing. His best interpretations are of the crush-song "Taylor the Latte Boy", the troop-stormer "Mein Herr" from Cabaret (which he should know how to sing, and does) and "Every Time We Say Goodbye" (which everyone knows). His voice is, to put it politely, smoky - impolitely, like his stories, sometimes a little flat.

There is a very smart cut-out of Cumming in evening wear onstage at the beginning of the show, which is disappointingly replaced by the real thing in a sweatshirt, denim jacket and low-rise Mohican haircut. My feeling is that if Cumming had tried harder, he could have afforded to look as relaxed as he did.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website