Scots star Alan Cumming is teaming up with two of the pop world’s most celebrated divas for a new film inspired by the classic stage musical Cabaret.

The 44-year-old actor is co-starring with Christina Aguilera and Cher in Burlesque, which has just started shooting in Los Angeles. The team behind the film say it is “inspired” by Cabaret, with which Cumming had great success in the 1990s, both on the London stage and on Broadway.

The movie is designed as a vehicle to turn Aguilera into a Hollywood superstar.

Cumming won a Tony award, theatre’s equivalent of the Oscars, for Cabaret, before going on to appear in a wide range of Hollywood movies, including X2, the second X-Men movie, in which he played the blue-skinned Nightcrawler.In the new film Cumming plays a character with distinct similarities to his role of Emcee in Cabaret. His character is described by the American trade magazine Variety as “the club’s gender-bending host and master of ceremonies”.

Filming has just begun, though Cumming has not been involved in the initial scenes. “I can confirm that he’s in it,” said his New York publicist Bianca Bianconi. “He has been cast in a role in Burlesque. I can’t put him on the phone. He’s in Australia.”

He has just finished performing his one-man show, I Bought a Blue Car Today, in Sydney and Brisbane. Although he is currently unavailable to discuss the new film, insiders suggest he will be singing with both Aguilera and Cher.

This is Aguilera’s first film acting role, although the 28-year-old multiple Grammy winner provided the voice for a Jamaican jellyfish in the animated film Shark Tale a few years ago. She began her showbiz career in her early teens, singing on The Mickey Mouse Club on American TV before becoming one modern pop’s greatest divas.

It is Cher’s first major role for a decade, but the 63-year-old showbiz veteran already has a very impressive acting resume that includes a best actress Oscar in 1988 for her performance in the romantic comedy Moonstruck.

Aguilera has what is essentially the Liza Minnelli role in Cabaret.

Cabaret, based on the Christopher Isherwood novel Goodbye to Berlin, was set in Germany in the 1930s, against the backdrop of the Nazis’ rise to power and the fall of the Weimar Republic. It was turned into a film in 1972 with Liza Minnelli as American singer Sally Bowles and Joel Grey as the MC at the club. Both won Oscars. Burlesque is set in Los Angeles in the present.

Little information has been released about the film, but Aguilera plays a small-town girl from Iowa who goes to Los Angeles to pursue her dream of stardom as a singer. In the film Cher runs a struggling “neo-burlesque” club on Sunset Boulevard. She gives Aguilera a job and becomes her mentor.

In the stage version of Cabaret, Cumming played the role of the Emcee at the Donmar Warehouse revival in London in 1993-94 and then on Broadway in 1998.

Cumming, who is originally from Aberfeldy in Perthshire, attained local celebrity status when he co-starred with Forbes Masson in the Scottish sitcom The High Life in 1995. He had major supporting roles in GoldenEye (1995) and Spice World (1997), playing the Spice Girls’ manager.

But unusually it was a stage production, Cabaret, and the attendant publicity, that made him a star in the US. It was around that time he revealed he was bisexual, and he has since campaigned for gay rights. He applied for US citizenship and his one-man show, I Bought a Blue Car Today, takes its title from a sentence he had to write down to prove he could write English.

Aguilera is one of America’s top pop stars but has so far made little headway in Tinseltown – although, often, the transition from pop music success to film stardom is seldom a smooth one, particularly for women. Britney Spears fell flat on her face with Crossroads in 2002 and Madonna’s acting has been universally pilloried.

However, the producers have assembled a strong cast around Aguilera. Kristen Bell from the TV series Veronica Mars plays the club’s established star, who is upset by the arrival of Aguilera’s character. Cam Gigandet, from the hit vampire movie Twilight, plays the club piano player and provides romantic interest. The cast also includes Stanley Tucci, Julianne Hough and Eric Dane from Grey’s Anatomy.

On one showbiz website a contributor wrote: “What a wonderful cast… This movie is going to be awesome.”

Source: Herald Scotland