Cabaret's Alan Cumming is once again on leave from the Kander and Ebb tuner. He's filming additional scenes in Italy for Julie Taymor's film adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.

The film co-stars Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. Cumming is scheduled to come back to the Cabaret at Studio 54 on Dec. 19. Until then, Vance Avery is playing the role of the emcee. Cumming has been back in the show since his return from the initial Titus filming, Dec. 1.

The movie is being financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen's Clear Blue Sky Productions and the U.K.-based N.D.F. International. The film will be released sometime in 1999. Peckos, who is currently at the Cannes Film Festival selling the picture, would not reveal the budget.

Other creative personnel on the Titus film, include Dante Ferretti (Kundun), who will be the production designer; costume designer Milena Canonera (Chariots of Fire); and Taymor's longtime collaborator composer Elliot Goldenthal (Juan Darien, Interview With the Vampire).

Taymor, whose career has skyrocketed since her Broadway staging of Disney's The Lion King, previously mounted a stage version of Titus Andronicus in 1994 at New York's Theatre for a New Audience. Hopkins has appeared in such films as The Remains of the Day, Amistad, and The Silence of the Lambs, for which he won an Oscar.