Tim Minchin review – a triumphant comeback that is short on laughs
Tim Minchin was “misdiagnosed” as a comedian, he says in his new show, Back. You can see what he means: comedian doesn’t begin to cover the talents of a man who composed the musical Matilda, then moved to Hollywood to write and direct his own $100m animated movie. That project was cancelled after four years’ work, triggering a depressed Minchin’s return to Australia and – indirectly – this new tour, his first for eight years. It is in many ways a triumphant comeback, a three-hour spectacular tracing the story of Minchin’s life in “old songs, new songs and fuck you songs”. It comes with a guarantee to raise the roof – if not with as many laughs as one might have wished for.
I feel churlish saying so because Minchin lays it on thick here, with a slick seven-piece band and set engineered to make the room shake. It can’t be faulted as an onslaught of entertainment, even if one wonders whether Minchin’s songs – many of which depend on linguistic dexterity for their effect – are best served by this push-the-boat out approach. You can see the attraction to the rock’n’roll nerd himself, whose tracks always aspired to the condition of rock opera. That was part of the joke – but it’s a part that evaporates when the fantasy becomes reality and Minchin’s puns are subsumed beneath the wall of sound.
That’s not an issue at the start of the show, which finds our kohl-eyed, big-haired host alone at his piano performing old favourite, F Sharp, and that torrent of wordplay and atheist sarcasm, Thank You God. There’s some anecdotes about his early years as a cash-strapped musician and actor, a period we might designate (after his fellow ginger Simply Red) as: money’s too tight, Tim Minchin. As if to celebrate that those days are gone, the curtain then drops in a blaze of lights to reveal his backing band, and the register changes from intimate to grandiose. There follows a brassy reworking of If I Didn’t Have You, while his ode to cheese is given a hyperactive makeover. New songs include bittersweet ballad Leaving LA and I’ll Take Lonely Tonight, a song about resisting sexual temptation that flirts with a humblebrag and ends up being lovely.
Lowlights include a lecture about confirmation bias and the lack of empathy between today’s siloed social tribes – all good points, but not novel and made with a heavy hand to tee up Minchin’s earnest song on the subject, 15 Minutes. But there are many highlights, among them a droll indoors standup section deriving from John Mayer’s single Your Body is a Wonderland, and a closing number introduced as Minchin’s effort to emulate Bob Dylan. Its dissimilarity to Dylan seems to be the joke until this violently intemperate number persuades you that it may well be the perfect (petty, plaintive) protest song for our hostile times.
The encore offers the bonus of When I Grow Up from Matilda, a gem of a song that sparkles a little less when performed this stridently. I’d rather it had been handled with the light touch of Carry You, an a capella tribute to Minchin’s recently deceased tour manager. Here, as elsewhere, it feels as if Minchin’s put a lot of himself into a show that delivers on autobiography, opinion and big, brash musicality – if a little less so on comedy.
•At Eventim Apollo, London, 12-14 November. Then touring.