It’s no coincidence that Alan Cumming scheduled a screening of Bob Fosse’s film version of Cabaret as part of this year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival program. Whether it be adversity, ageing or the death of loved ones, Cumming’s philosophy is ‘life is a cabaret old chum, come to the cabaret’, and the arbiters of ‘age appropriateness’ can go jump.

Alan Cumming. Photograph © Francis Hills

Resplendent in muscle dinner jacket and tie, shorts and sneakers, Cumming took the audience on a journey of self-reflection, a journey that has become all too familiar post-COVID. Beginning with But Alive from the musical Applause, which opened on Broadway in 1970 starring Lauren Bacall, Cumming ingeniously recast the Peggy Lee classic Is That All There Is? with snapshots from his own life such as being trapped in Montevideo, Minnesota with the choice between a McDonalds, Burger King and Dairy Queen for dinner and pondering the merits of expiring with a final glass of champagne à la Chekhov.

Everything from the Streisand/Kristofferson seventies version of A Star is Born was another resurrected classic before Cumming took us on darker terrain in the form of the Grim...