Alan Cumming likes those ‘sappy’ songs he’ll sing here

Over the years, 51-year-old Scottish actor Alan Cumming has played such widely ranging roles as Eli Gold, the tightly wound campaign adviser on the TV series “The Good Wife”; the demonic, blue-faced Nightcrawler in the action film “X2: X-Men United”; and all the major characters in a one-man production of “Macbeth.”

So it’s no surprise to find out that he can sing, too. After all, he won a Tony award for his performance as the Master of Ceremonies in the 1998 Broadway revival of “Cabaret.”

His latest venture, “Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs,” is a freewheeling, cabaret-styled mix of songs and stories that debuted at the Café Carlyle in New York in 2015. Cumming brings the show to Seattle’s Town Hall on Saturday (July 2).

It’s a suitably eclectic — and surprising — mix. Despite the show’s title, Cumming is serious about his sentimentality. He performs Miley Cyrus (“The Climb”) with as much sincerity as he does Noel Coward (“If Love Were All”). He gleefully mashes up Adele’s “Someone Like You,” Lady Gaga’s “The Edge of Glory” and Katy Perry’s “Firework” into a robust tour de force called “Someone Like the Edge of Firework.”

“They’re all songs that I really connected with in an emotional way and that mean something to me,” Cumming explained over the phone from New York City in June.

Cumming also unveils his own songwriting skills in a sendup jingle advertising the Trojan condom Ecstasy.

The show has plenty of puckish commentary, including a story about the painful process of having a tattoo of an ex-boyfriend’s name removed from his groin area (Cumming, who’s openly bisexual, is married to graphic artist Grant Shaffer).

The between-songs patter draws heavily on Cumming’s 2014 memoir, “Not My Father’s Son,” which tells of the horrific abuse he suffered at the hands of his father, who later claimed Cumming was not his son (a DNA test proved otherwise). It also deals with Cumming’s appearance on the U.K. TV program “Who Do You Think You Are?” during which he learned that his maternal grandfather, a soldier he was told died in a “shooting accident,” actually killed himself during a game of Russian roulette.

Performing as himself, said Cumming, and not hiding inside a character, was a challenge.

“It was the thing I was most afraid of in my performing life,” he admitted. “And it’s something that took me a long time to feel comfortable with. But now I really love the way I get to connect to the audience … It’s all just about being yourself and being unashamed of it.”

Cumming takes care to give his “roller-coaster ride” show a happy ending: “You go through a lot with me — but you come out the other end smiling.”