Alan Cumming & Ari Shapiro: Och and Oy! A Considered Cabaret

Artists

Alan Cumming

Is there anyone who has a closer association with cabaret than Alan Cumming? On Broadway and the West End he played the Master of Ceremonies in Kander and Ebb’s masterpiece Cabaret, winning a Tony and every other award available in the process.

More recently he has toured the world with his cabaret shows, I Bought A Blue Car Today, which debuted at the Lincoln Centre, NYC followed by the Sydney Opera House (he doesn’t believe in starting small), and Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs, which earned huge critical acclaim and sold out Carnegie Hall, the London Palladium, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA and the Kennedy Center, Washington DC. He also released albums of the same name.

Ari Shapiro

Ari Shapiro has been one of the hosts of All Things Considered, NPR's award-winning afternoon news magazine, since 2015. During his first two years on the program, listenership to All Things Considered grew at an unprecedented rate, with more people tuning in during a typical quarter-hour than any other program on the radio. He has covered wars in Iraq, Ukraine and Israel, and he has filed stories from dozens of countries and most of the 50 states.
Shapiro spent two years as NPR's International Correspondent based in London, traveling the world to cover a wide range of topics for NPR's news programs. His overseas move came after four years as NPR's White House Correspondent during President Barack Obama's first and second terms. Shapiro also embedded with the campaign of Republican Mitt Romney for the duration of the 2012 presidential race. He was NPR's Justice Correspondent for five years during the George W. Bush Administration, covering debates over surveillance, detention and interrogation in the years after Sept. 11.

Shapiro's reporting has been consistently recognized by his peers. He was part of an NPR team that won a national Edward R. Murrow award for coverage of the Trump Administration's asylum policies on the US-Mexico border. The Columbia Journalism Review honored him with a laurel for his investigation into disability benefits for injured American veterans. The American Bar Association awarded him the Silver Gavel for exposing the failures of Louisiana's detention system after Hurricane Katrina. He was the first recipient of the American Judges' Association American Gavel Award for his work on U.S. courts and the American justice system. And at age 25, Shapiro won the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize for an investigation of methamphetamine use and HIV transmission.

An occasional singer, Shapiro makes frequent guest appearances with the "little orchestra" Pink Martini, whose recent albums feature several of his contributions, in multiple languages. Since his debut at the Hollywood Bowl in 2009, Shapiro has performed live at many of the world's most storied venues, including Carnegie Hall in New York, The Royal Albert Hall in London and L'Olympia in Paris. In 2019 he created the show "Och and Oy" with Tony Award winner Alan Cumming, and they continue to tour the country with it. Shapiro was born in Fargo, North Dakota, and grew up in Portland, Oregon. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Yale. He began his journalism career as an intern for NPR Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg, who has also occasionally been known to sing in public.