Alan Cumming Wants Us All to Let Go

Over a thirty-year career, Alan Cumming has been a stage star, a cabaret performer, a memoirist, a night-club owner, and a political activist. Animating many of these endeavors are his talents as a raconteur and an m.c., perhaps most famously in his Tony-winning role in “Cabaret” on Broadway, a show he starred in twice. This past Monday night, Cumming brought the latest of his numerous one-man shows, “Alan Cumming Is Not Acting His Age,” to Studio 54, in Manhattan. Between torch numbers—including Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” and “Mein Herr” from “Cabaret”—he talked about the time he drank a handle of liquor that Florence Henderson sneaked into Carol Channing’s ninety-fifth-birthday party. (Henderson died a few months later, Cumming said, but he has not forgotten her advice: “You never take chances with vodka.”) He talked about how he and his fellow-Scotsman Sean Connery developed pet names for each other (Connery was King, Cumming was Prince), and about the night when his “Battle of the Sexes” co-star Emma Stone brought the tennis legend Billie Jean King and Paul McCartney to Club Cumming, a cozy boitê and queer performance space that Cumming opened in the East Village, in 2017. “It sounds like a joke,” he said. “Emma Stone, Billie Jean King, and Paul McCartney walk into a bar!”