Alan Cumming: I Bought a Blue Car Today

Synopsis

Alan Cumming returns to the West End musical stage for the first time in over fifteen years - he was last seen in Sam Mendes’ Donmar Warehouse revival of Cabaret. Accompanied by his musical director, Lance Horne, Cumming unleashes his favourite tunes, belting out celebrated hits alongside little-known gems, whilst entertaining his audience with poignant anecdotes from his colourful past. A musical journey peppered with material by Frank Sinatra, Dory Previn, Kander & Ebb and Cyndi Lauper, to name only a few.

Our Review:

Terri Paddock - 3 September 2009

Alan Cumming has an abject fear of singing in public – which is understandable given that, in truth, his singing voice isn’t terribly strong. But in his new one-man cabaret show, I Bought a Blue Car Today, you get so much more than songs. In the extended links between the 17 numbers, arranged by musical director Lance Horne, Cumming proves himself to be a raconteur of the highest quality – engaging, amusing, insightful and self-deprecating – who grows in confidence as the evening builds.

There’s a good smattering of showbiz anecdotes about an eclectic mix of personalities, of whom Cumming is by turns either surprisingly starstruck or tragically unaware - from Graham Norton to Cyndi Lauper, Mika, Walter Cronkite, Whoopi Goldberg, Mikhail Baryshnikov and, most hilariously, MGM musicals legend Ann Miller – and amusing experiences with paparazzi chases, the Hollywood merchandise machine (did you know that Cumming is a Flintstones’ chewable vitamin?) and gos...

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Latest User Review

JohnnyFox - 4 September 2009:

Alan Cumming told ‘Hello’ magazine his new show was ‘me with a band singing some songs I like, and telling stories about what’s happened to me in the ten years since I moved to America’. +++ That this is truthfully the middle and both ends of it disguises the fact that it’s a beguiling evening in company of an undeniably charming performer. +++ Although the youthful band members seem recruited from music schools and possibly tube stations expressly for this show, they blaze a trail from choky, smoky jazz to bumping grinding Dolly Parton with panache. +++ Cumming’s musical choices roam the genres from Cole Porter to Cindy Lauper, but also defeat his ability to nail a personal performance style. He occasionally seems tentative in the torch songs but in rocker mode his vocals and his free left hand threaten to punch a hole in the fourth wall. +++ The confessional anecdotes interspersed with the songs are clearly from the heart but may be familiar to fans of this well-publicised actor, and the name-dropping varies from the deceased (Walter Cronkite, Ann Miller) to the less-than-topically famous, although through a thin story about crashing for the afternoon in the apartment of John Cameron Mitchell he leads in to a blinding medley from Mitchell’s ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch’. +++ When someone is as massively and variously talented in writing, music, acting, film-making and OBE-deserving gay activism as Cumming, and at 44 appears as gamine and youthful as a baby-faced Marc Almond (whose hairstyle and fondness for mascara he appears to have appropriated wholesale) then chirrups gaily for two hours about his transatlantic dual citizenship, public fame and happy marriage, you’re not sure whether you want to embrace him or kill him. +++ Let’s go with embrace for now. +++ Since writing this review for Londonist.com, I reflected that Cumming sings better in the 'show tune' elements (although he murders Mein Herr with a homicidal ferocity the Kristallnacht stormtroopers would envy) and gets teary-eyed at the rather underweight torch songs he and his cohort/writer Lance Boring have selected. +++ Like so many pulled-together short-run specials in the West End, the show's flabby and needs a director who's not afraid to slap him around a bit - step forward T Nunn and J Kelly - plus the lighting and sound persons should be fired, preferably before curtain tonight. +++ read more of my stuff on www.londonist.com or www.blowstar.blogspot.com...

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