Minchin the maverick makes a welcome return
Tim Minchin: Apart Together Trackdown, Sydney
Australia has a lot to be smug about. It has got on top of its Covid infection rate. It’s poised (as a result) to see mass-participation theatre events recommence in Sydney (beginning with the 1972 musical Pippin next week), ahead of any vaccine.
And it has reclaimed Tim Minchin, the wandering multitalented maverick who gave the world Matilda the musical 10 years ago, the RSC mega-hit that transformed a feted comedy outlier into a showbiz insider.
Well, almost; for a while. Minchin – born in fact in Northampton, but raised in Perth – came “home” in 2017.
He had had a bruising time in the States – what with an axed film animation ( Larrikins) and brief Broadway run for his supersmart musical version of Groundhog Day.
He says he always planned to settle back Down Under after his adventures. Even so, whatever lostness, restlessness and discontent he might have felt after those setbacks has been amply, and artistically, channelled.
Upright – the odd-couple Oz road-trip TV “dramedy” series in which he stars as a drifter musician who befriends (in a wholesome way) a runaway girl – has been hailed as a major achievement.
And reintroducing himself to fans in both hemispheres, yesterday saw the timezone-leaping video-stream of a concert of his (superb) first studio album – Apart Together.
With a sparse audience attending the musician-crammed (safely so) scene at Trackdown studios, Sydney, he read his fast-written spiel from a large notebook. Low-key and low-tech, it offset the polish of the slickly shot and edited soirée.
This isn’t a comedy album, he stressed. The American physician Duncan Macdougall, he reminded us, once attempted to weigh the human soul. Souls don’t fascinate the arch secularist – “but I’m quite interested in the figurative idea that loss has mass”.
Heavy? Yes, but he retains his lightness of touch. Wild-eyed, straggly-haired, he took to a grand piano and crooned 11 numbers richly suggestive of an artist in midlife, contemplating vanished years, missing companions and lost chances and looking ahead to the final vanishing point, by turns morbid, socially and self-satirical and busting with unabashed yearning.
The opener, The Absence of You, offers the emotionalism of his previous best songs, while retaining a wry, metropolitan eye, ensuring that even its anthemic chorus has a saving edge of the knowingly overblown.
Relaying solitudinous vignettes from Paris, New York and London,
mourning the absence of his other half, it speaks to his own career-driven trajectories, the hollowness of modern living pre-covid and maybe our lockdown lives now.
Am I projecting? It’s his gift to make something attentively, wittily about himself carry a sense of the universal.
The title track – inspired by the story of an elderly couple found frozen to death in a mobile home, locked in each other’s arms – is equally affecting, his introduction summing up his outlook: “Reality deserves to be looked square in the eye – that’s romance, isn’t it?”
Not everything is as matchingly fine. But even middling Minchin is incisive and original in flavour, despite his sounding Elton John-ishly midAtlantic. Whether he’s bidding a snarkily regretful farewell to LA (that Hollywood sign – “Just some really ugly letters on a pretty ugly hill”) or keyboard duetting with his hero Ben Folds on the quizzically affectionate rock-ballad Beautiful Head, you want to listen, want to watch. It’s good to have him back, however remotely.