Tim Minchin Is a Born-Again Believer in the Sacredness of the Stage

Twenty years ago, a curly-haired Australian writer and performer named Tim Minchin applied chemical straightener to his locks and started referring to his solo cabaret show as “comedy.”

Minchin proceeded to carve an extraordinary niche for himself with an act in which he skewered religion, pseudoscience, alternative medicine, political correctness and hypocrisy—and that one theater critic who gave him a sh*tty review—while playing a mean piano. Here was a public intellectual with a potty mouth and a knack for pretty melodies, coming off like the bastard hippie lovechild of Robert Smith and Christopher Hitchens. You could feel him pouncing gleefully at the opportunity, in a song about sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church, to rhyme “papist” with “rapist.”

Things are different now. Since around the time the University of Western Australia awarded Minchin an honorary Doctorate of Letters in 2013, some of Minchin’s most piquant output has been as an inspirational speaker. His new show, An Unfunny Evening with Tim Minchin and His Piano, which lands in New York this month after stops in Toronto, Minneapolis, Boston and Washington D.C., reveals Minchin in an intimate, earnest contemplation of the stuff of life, with the piss-taking and spleen-venting dialed right down. (A book of his speeches will be released later this year in Australia and the U.K., and next year in the U.S.) Tellingly, he's dropped the "comedy" tag.

The incisive intellect is the same as ever—and Minchin’s views haven’t fundamentally changed. But now he's keen to see what he can do as a force for positivity. 

“It is very easy to become a curmudgeonly old man sitting on a pseudo-intellectual porch criticizing the kids on your lawn,” he said in a video interview recently. “But I want to talk about the potential for beauty and connection and art. I'm better at that. I'm better when I'm making speeches that make people feel uplifted and hopeful. I have to keep talking about what is special and good—not just trying to wrestle with things that I actually can't fix."

Of course, it’s probably no accident that Minchin got tired of the ranty diatribe just as it became the dominant mode of online social discourse. Minchin still believes in the power of the angrily articulate rant. But as a way to convey his ideas, the form interests him less lately.

“As you get older and more powerful, the form of the polemic might no longer be the right form. Okay, that was cool to rail against that stuff at that time when I was that age in that space, but there might be something different I can do.”

Fortunately for Minchin, he has built a loyal following of fans interested in the quality of his ideas and the verbal elasticity with which he expresses them, whatever the forum. “I say to my audience at the beginning of this show, whatever you think this show is, it might not be that, but if you get bored, then I will shoot myself. You will never get bored. There’s no time for anyone to look down at their phone.”

For the past two decades, Minchin has kept up an astonishingly diverse career, writing the music and lyrics for the musicals Matilda and Groundhog Day, acting on screen (Californication, Robin Hood) and on stage (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the U.K. arena tour of Jesus Christ Superstar), as well as writing and starring in two seasons of the excellent Australian television series Upright.

Seven years have passed since Minchin's Groundhog Day opened on Broadway, where it ran for 176 performances and 32 previews before closing. The show has been more openly embraced elsewhere, with a London revival opening last year and a run in Melbourne earlier this year.

With characteristic candor, Minchin is totally open to discussing the troughs and valleys of his career—“I’m actually more comfortable talking about the nuances and complexities of dealing with your stumbles than about how f*cking amazing I am”—but, asked about the ostensible failure of the show to connect with Broadway audiences, he insists he’s not really bothered by it.

“The thing with Broadway is that, like America in general, it insists on being the center. When you're there, you get caught up in that mindset.”

The show’s abbreviated run had more to do, he said, with the preponderance of outstanding musicals that season. “Natasha, Pierre had an incredible uniqueness and individuality. And Evan Hansen—those guys are just brilliant songwriters. That story wasn’t really for an old curmudgeon like me; it was more for young people, and that’s how it should be on Broadway. Come From Away was beautiful, innocent, much less highfalutin’. So, there was a lot of joy in that year. I just think Groundhog Day was something different—but that’s okay."

He added, “I prefer our show, but of course I do. It doesn’t make me think I’ll write differently next time—not even a little bit. It does make me wonder if Broadway is the right fit for me.”

MINCHIN CAN SPEAK eloquently about the transcendent beauty of a dominant-13th chord; his music for Matilda, he says, was built around that shape. But, as a resolute skeptic and rationalist, he isn’t all that interested in unpacking the mystery of the creative impulse. “If you can’t get anywhere near explaining the prime mover of the universe, then a certain amount of existence has to be like, ‘Eh, f*cking hell, isn’t it weird how you feel so much?'”

There is one aspect of his life which resembles religious observance, however.

Last year, towards the end of one of his shows in Sydney, Minchin told the audience—to gasps—that his mother had passed away the previous day. He then led the room in a soulful rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

It was important to go on with the show, Minchin told me.

“I hate the idea of doctrine,” he said. “But I am a show person. And there’s only one f*cking command, as far as I know, in show land, and that’s that you go on the f*cking stage unless you’re dying. And I love that. I love the clarity of that.

"I've had buckets by my piano. I've had to run off stage at interval and sh*t myself. I've sung through sweating and shaking. I've sung on the day of my mother's death. I'm proud of that. That is my identity. That's my religion. You go the f*ck on stage. And you can hear the way I say it that it taps into that the doctrinal instinct humans have. I've got a religion too. So there you go."

As for “Hallelujah,” what does that song, with its atmosphere of quasi-religiosity, mean to a non-believer like Minchin? “That human instinct to reach up and out into black f*cking nothingness—that is emotional to me. This hopeless, beautiful attempt at finding something bigger in the very safe knowledge that there’s nothing out there. That’s what I find beautiful and sad and emotional.”

When Minchin toured the U.S. for the first time in 2011, he was rapturously received as a kind of atheist messiah, spreading the good word of rationalist reason in the Bible Belt. In the new show, with Minchin speaking sincerely about finding meaning in a meaningless universe, the feeling in the room again verges on the spiritual.

One gets the sense that Minchin is pleased with the irony and—a glimpse of that old devilish glee—keen to lean into it. “Theater is church, man.”