Alan Cumming will this summer make a return to the Edinburgh international festival – not as an actor, but as a cabaret singer and club promoter.
Cumming is to take up residence in the EIF’s base near Edinburgh Castle for three weeks with a cabaret show called Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs.
It is a show he has performed in New York, but his commitments on the hit TV show The Good Wife means there has never been an extended run.
Festival director Fergus Linehan said Cumming, who last performed at the festival in The Bacchae in 2007, had demands which EIF was delighted to agree to.
“We said, ‘Would you come and do the show?’ and he said, ‘Yes, on the basis that I can then have a club.’ We said absolutely.”
Precisely how it will work remains to be seen. “Maybe it will be him performing, maybe he will play some records, maybe he will just hang about. People are saying it’s madness because so many people will turn up, but hopefully it will be fine.”
Cumming is one of a long list of internationally acclaimed artists heading to the festival this year, announced at the programme launch in Edinburgh on Wednesday.
In total, the festival will host 2,442 artists from 36 countries.
The major classical names this year include pianists András Schiff and Daniil Trifonov, mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli, violinist Maxim Vengerov and soprano Anja Kampe; while orchestras include the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Rotterdam Philharmonic and the Russian National Orchestra.
There will be major productions from two of the world’s leading opera festivals – Norma from Salzburg and Così fan tutte from Aix.
Theatre highlights include the European premiere of a new production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, directed by John Tiffany and starring Cherry Jones (President Allison Taylor in 24) in the lead role.
The 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death will be marked with Thomas Ostermeier’s Richard III from Berlin’s Schaubühne theatre; Cheek by Jowl’s Measure for Measure, in a collaboration with Moscow’s Pushkin Theatre; and a re-imagining of Twelfth Night – with Illyria as a 1970s seaside holiday resort – from the France-based company of Dan Jemmett.
Barry Humphries will leave Dame Edna behind as he presents and performs an evening of Weimar cabaret with performance artist Meow Meow, soon to be seen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe.
The contemporary music strand, meanwhile, includes Youssou N’Dour, Young Fathers, Sigur Rós and Mogwai.
