Ready for This
Tim Minchin
15 April 2009
The Forum
Melbourne is more than ready to welcome Tim Minchin home. With more ushers at the Forum than audience at his early Butterfly Club gigs, Ready For This sees Minchin return a super star
I’ve had a bit of a crush on Tim since I first saw him at the Hi Fi Bar. Combining an intelligent wit, with a love of wordiness and virtuosic piano tinkling, this bare-footed, wild-haired, mascara wearing rock ‘n’ roll nerd parodied rock wankers, comedy tossers and all sorts of self-gratifiers, as he intimately shared his slightly-dorky life with his proudly-geekish audience.
After a handful of Green Room awards, a couple of MICF awards and some little thing called the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe, Minchin moved to the UK to collect even more adoring minions.
His popularity has forced him on to bigger stages, so the new show lacks intimacy, while Minchin’s material has become more observational and less personal. As the uber-cool, the theatre-snobs and the I-saw-him-on-Spicks-and-Specks crowd are now buying tickets, it’s natural that he develops a show with broad appeal. Don’t get me wrong – his material is as good as ever, but it’s still evolving to adapt to his growing super stardom. Ready For This would benefit from a tighter structure and more consistently themed content, but it’s not stopping anyone enjoying it.
Minchin is still frustrated about religion and new-agers (or is that anyone with faith?) and “Bears Don’t’ Dig On Dancing” is as fab as his earlier activist hit “Canvas Bags”, but his unsure and nerdy persona doesn’t seem quite right as hundreds of cheering fans welcome him to the stage, and it’s harder to satirise rock stars when you too are selling t-shirts and CDs in the foyer.
One person unlikely to wear a Minchin t-shirt is Guardian reviewer Phil Daoust. Daoust didn’t fancy Minchin’s 2005 Edinburgh Fringe show (the Perrier winning one) and went so far as to suggest that our Tim should be tarred and feathered. Tim’s musical response sent many fellow-reviewing pens scribbling in the dark, as it takes the anger performers feel about negative feedback to a level that is sure to have many artists inserting the name of their most hated reviewer – even if it ruins the rhyme. In fairness to Daoust, his is an honest review and he justifies his opinion, but Minchin’s reply is much wittier and more ironic – well I hope it’s ironic.
With sold out shows, audiences wanting more and gigs booked for the rest of the year, Tim doesn’t need to worry what any reviewer thinks. But I still think he’s great – and being a pale and freckly red head with great boobs - I reckon Tim thinks I’m OK as well.
This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.
