Tony-winning actor Alan Cumming will be taking two months off from the hit musical Cabaret to take a role in Julie Taymor's film Titus, her long-planned film adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, according to Cabaret press rep Erin Dunn (of the Boneau/Bryan-Brown office).
As previously reported by Playbill On-Line, the film stars Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. Cumming will leave Cabaret after the Sept. 13 show and return on Nov. 24. No word (as of Sept. 1) which role he'll be playing.
Robert Sella, currently starring in another Roundabout show, Side Man, will sub Cumming in Cabaret.
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. Pre-production on the film has begun and shooting will commence in Rome this fall. 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 include Dante Ferretti (Kundun), who will be the production designer; costume designer Milena Canonera (Chariots of Fire); and Taymor's longtime collaborator Elliot Goldenthal (Juan Darien, Interview With the Vampire), who will compose the music.
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.
