Review: Tim Minchin is unbecoming

Australian comedian and songwriter (and poet and composer and philosopher, I guess) Tim Minchin played the Auckland Town Hall last night as part of the Auckland Arts Festival/Te Ahurei Toi O Tamaki.

The show opens with a recording telling us to turn off our phones and to not take photos, and to just be in the moment and enjoy the show.

We're not even ten minutes in - Tim Minchin has played opening song "Beauty", and is addressing the crowd from a perch on one of the stage monitors - when a front rower doesn't just take a photo, they use a flash with a red warning light that distracts the energetic, easily distracted Minchin into speaking to them directly and almost losing his chain of thought.

It told us a lot about the make-up of the audience, maybe the most diverse I've ever seen - ranging from teenagers to octogenarians, a fair dollop of queer people and people of colour, a large number of neurodiverse folks (neurospicy, Minchin calls them). Everyone gets a shout out and a thank you.

I’m pleasantly surprised to find Minchin is an extremely self aware performer. Across a two hour run time, he plays little more than a dozen songs, but each one is buffeted by mile-a-minute discussions of his crowds, his writing process, musicals Groundhog Day and Matilda (he wrote both), the background to the songs he is playing, his path to “unbecoming” a comedian (apparently harder than becoming a comedian), and even the death of his mother last year. 

Minchin explains how the show started in a chapel in Perth, in which he had to google ‘tim minchin songs’ to find his repertoire; how "Song Of The Masochist" was written in his early twenties to convince his brother to steer clear of an ex-girlfriend; how his Dad loved a CGI statue in the music video for "Apart Together" so much that Minchin had a plaster cast version created and shipped it to his Dad, only for it to be broken in transit; how "Quiet", from Matilda The Musical, has become an anthem for the autism community; how he wrote "Carry You" for his show Upright - about a man trying to get from Sydney to Perth to see his sick Mum - a year before his Mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer and he desperately wanted to get from Sydney to Perth during the pandemic.

You can't really review the show like a concert (despite my headline). Sure, it's a collection of songs broken up by crowd work, albeit more crowd work than usual. But it's not a concert; An Unfunny* Evening with Tim Minchin and His Piano, the title for this show, is more like a retrospective, having infinitely more in common with those 'An Audience With' shows you see on TV occasionally. It’s intimate and vulnerable. It almost feels like he might host a Q&A after.

No, Minchin isn't out there to entertain. He does do that: a virtuosic piano player, the man knows how to entertain a crowd - older songs like "Darkside" and "You Grew On Me" are cleverly written and riotously funny, the former even allowing for an extended solo in which Minchin broke down how he constructed the solo. It helps that Minchin is charismatic and innately funny; he presents as an ADHD addled intellectual with a despicably dark sense of humour.

Heck, even the title has an asterisk: “*The promoter can’t guarantee the artist won’t inadvertently amuse.”

But entertaining though it is, An Unfunny Evening finds Minchin making peace with where he is now, and trying to make sense of it for himself by explaining it to us. He doesn't want to be a comedian. He just wants to be himself, play his songs to a receptive audience, enjoy the breadth of work he gets to do, and use his voice to promote goodness and love and acceptance and togetherness.

The show ends with an encore, a cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" in which he goads the audience into singing the chorus. It's a transcendent moment to cap off the show. And if the aim was getting us to feel part of something bigger than ourselves, it certainly managed that.

I commented to my wife after the show that I walked into the Auckland Town Hall as a curious and casual listener of Tim Minchin’s music, but I walked out a hardcore fan. The man is a genius. And I encourage you to try and get along to his show, if you can; there are a few tickets left for tonight’s performance.

I wish I could go again, honestly.

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Five Songs Worth Checking Out!

> Idles - Dancer (ft LCD Soundsystem)
I can’t tell if the video for “Dancer” is adorable of naff, but I gotta tell you, the song makes me want to dance, and when I do, I look like the band walking through the carpark in the video for “Dancer”.

> Pantera - 5 Minutes Alone
A brutal track that has been living rent-free in my head - Pantera’s Far Beyond Driven turns 30 years old tomorrow.

> SZA - Ghost In The Machine (ft Phoebe Bridgers)
My favourite track from SZA’s brilliant album SOS; SZA just announced a third show at Spark Arena and I still can’t afford it.

> Kacey Musgraves - Moving Out
The gorgeous first single from Musgraves’ latest, Deeper Well.

> System Of A Down - Toxicity 
Lastly, a wee shout out to my son Freddy, who turns 8 today. I don’t know how, but “Toxicity” is his favourite song right now.

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Thanks for reading down this far - you rule!
See you tomorrow with My Week In Music.

Mā te wā,
Chris

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