MAC'S BACK.(The Talk of the Town)(Alan Cumming)(Interview)

On a recent morning, Alan Cumming arrived at the Roundabout Theatre's rehearsal studio with a family-sized pizza box. "Your breakfast?" someone asked. "No," he replied, "last night's dinner." Cumming no longer looks the way he did as the m.c. of the nasty little Weimar night club in the Roundabout's 1998 revival of "Cabaret." Then he was like a weasel, a skinny, wiggly thing that could dive down the nearest sinkhole at the sound of a police whistle. Now he has bulked up. He has a chest, shoulders, and biceps, all of which he needs, for he has taken on the testosteronal role of Mac the Knife in the Roundabout's production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "The Threepenny Opera," directed by Scott Elliott. "We've got him doing pushups," says Aszure Barton, a wholesome-looking thirty-year-old Canadian with wind-chime earrings, who is the show's choreographer.

Cumming and Barton were working on a routine that Mac does when, after numberless crimes, he is clapped in Newgate Prison. Thanks to his connections, he is given a posh cell, and he celebrates it in a song that, in Wallace Shawn's new translation, starts like this:

I've heard that starving geniuses are noble., They write their gorgeous verse in freezing garrets, While sharing with the rats some rotting carrots.

Mac wants no part of that: "You can't eat poems with a fork and knife. / You must have comfort for a happy life."

Cumming is not a dancer by trade, and he says that when, in a show, he has to dance in unison with others he is filled with dread. "But that's the good thing about being the main person onstage," he adds. "They have to fit in with you." It is just such a routine, with Mac in front and others backing him up, that Cumming and Barton were rehearsing. Basically, it is a vaudeville step dance, studded with telling gestures. On "rotting carrots," Cumming swipes his finger under his nose, to signify distaste. On "a happy life," this man, who has embraced Polly and ...