By Seth Rudetsky
26 Oct 2009

Alan Cumming
photo by Francis Hills

A week in the life of actor, musician, music director and talk-show host Seth Rudetsky.

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Hello from sunny Newport Beach, California! I'm here doing a benefit for the Make-A-Wish Foundation and just came from a delish breakfast with James in nearby Laguna Beach. And my Dad and his wife live in sort-of nearby Palm Desert so they're on their way up to meet me. Whenever I'm in California, I think that it's so gorgeous I could totally see myself moving here. The only problem is that I hate to drive. I guess I'd just have to take the L.A. subway a lot. It's good, isn't it?

Anyhoo, this week I interviewed Tony-Award winner Alan Cumming at my "Sirius/XM Live on Broadway" show. His new CD is called "I Bought a Blue Car Today," which is based on the citizenship test he had to take. In order to qualify as U.S. citizen, you need to prove you can read and write English and the oral dictation sentence he had to write was "I bought a blue car today." Oy, that kind of thing makes me so nervous. There are things I know I can do, but when I'm under pressure, I panic. Back in the '90s, I got very used to reading from the sheet music when I was the keyboardist for Grease! on Broadway, even though I totally had it memorized after playing it for more than two years. During one performance, the music fell to the floor and, though I knew it by heart, I was in a panic that I didn't know what was coming next. I was so nervous I was going to ruin the show… forgetting that having a 44-year-old woman to play Rizzo at the time perhaps already handled that. Speaking of Grease! and Rizzo, when my friend (and great composer) Steve Marzullo was playing the show when it first opened, he spilled coffee on the keyboard. Everyone in the pit thought it was going to break, but luckily it worked fine. Until Act Two. When Steve changed the keyboard sound to play "There Are Worse Things I Can Do" it transposed the song up a third! If you ever wanted to hear Rosie O'Donnell try to sing soprano, that night was your chance. Suffice it to say that Candide came to Broadway a few years later and that performance proved Rosie would not be in the running for the role of Cunegonde.

Alan also told me that when he was playing the Emcee in Cabaret he hit his head onstage and got a concussion. He passed out during intermission and remembers the stage manager standing over him asking, "Are you able to go on for Act Two?" He was not and they took him to the hospital. Weirdly enough, there was a woman in the audience who waited months and months to see the show and she also fainted during Act One and had to go to the E.R. She was devastated she missed the show and missed seeing Alan Cumming. Of course, she was overjoyed when he wound up with her in the E.R.! Alan was frantically wiping off his butt- cheek, and panicking he was going to get a Jewish doctor. Not because he's an anti-Semite, but because he didn't have time to take off his make-up when he left the theatre and he had big fat swastika on his patootie!

Listen to Seth's Podcast: Alan Cumming, Amanda McBroom and Hotel California

I saw Love, Loss and What I Wore with my Mom and we both loved it. The stories are fun and moving and the performances were a brava. However, my question is: why is one allowed to say anything one wants, and at any volume one wants, once you've hit the age of 70? Tyne Daly began the show by talking about various outfits she'd worn throughout the years and showing drawings of them. The drawings were facing out so everyone could see them, and yet that didn't stop a woman in the left of the audience from yelling, "We can't see them!!!!!" Regardless, the yelling worked and Tyne made sure the woman saw the drawings. And, thankfully, this time the woman was not my mother. Continued...

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