The Café Carlyle, a cozy New York nostalgia den where the likes of Woody Allen, Jeff Goldblum, and Molly Ringwald perform intimate shows for the city’s most well-to-do, is very much a Classy Establishment. It’s also very much an Establishment Establishment.
And then Alan Cumming began his two-week engagement on Tuesday and that all went to hell.
Cumming, currently seen in The Good Wife as Eli Gold, is fresh off a Broadway revival of Cabaret at Studio 54. He brought a touch of that hedonistic vibe uptown on Tuesday night, temporarily rechristening the joint “Club Cumming” with a vibrant neon sign whose fuchsia glow overpowered all the stuffy little fringe lamps that illuminated diners’ tables.
In the relaxed spirit of Club Cumming, he removed his blazer early into his act, revealing a fitted, sleeveless black button-up shirt and skinny leather tie beneath. With his short, spiky haircut, he looked like a refined elder statesman of the punk era. Or a male stripper about to begin his routine. Either way, he owned it.
In fact, everything he did seemed to be designed to make the cafe’s patrons clutch their pearls, both literally and figuratively.
The show, Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs, certainly lives up to its name, but not quite in the way that you’d expect at a venue which frequently attracts, well, rich, old white people. Yes, his set list included Goodnight Saigon by Billy Joel, sung in tribute to the late veteran grandfather that Cumming never met, and If Love Were All by Noel Coward for the baby boom set. But then there was Miley Cyrus’s The Climb and a full-throttle rendition of Avril Lavigne’s Complicated that had the handful of millennials in the room lip syncing along as if they were 13 all over again. All were delivered with Broadway-worthy bravado, and in Cumming’s natural Scottish accent.
Cumming and his musical director, Lance Horne, even performed a mashup for the occasion that combined Adele’s Something Like You with Lady Gaga’s The Edge of Glory, adding Katy Perry’s Firework as the cherry on top (don’t have $100-plus to see it live at Café Carlyle? The mashup is available on iTunes.)
But that was just the PG stuff.
He told a story about getting a tattoo of an ex-lover’s name removed from his nether regions, and sang a jingle called Ecstasy, which he’d written with Horne for an ad for Trojan condoms that also featured Ricki Lake.
When discussing the middling reviews for his Broadway show The Threepenny Opera, he couldn’t help but wisely note: “If you get a bad review for your performance but a good review for your cock, it balances out.” This was just one of the show’s multiple references to cocks.
But even more daring than the sex and drugs were Cumming’s jokes about class.
As is requisite at Café Carlyle, there was a great deal of celebrity-audience banter. But when he asked how many people had heard of The Threepenny Opera, there was only a light smattering of applause. Cumming didn’t miss a beat.
“Now you know what it feels like to be in a minority,” he said.
And, in one final act of admirable gall, he chose for his encore The Ladies Who Lunch, Stephen Sondheim’s ode to the ennui of New York’s wealthiest women.
But at this point, Cumming had been so successful in establishing a connection with the audience – sharing stories of his most emotionally harrowing moments and singing sentimental tunes to match – that this ribbing was received as one would a barb from a notoriously mischievous friend.
All in all, it was truly an evening of intimacy at Club Cumming.
