Woo hoo... I'm published. Kinda

I got to go see Tim Minchin last weekend, and was asked to review the performance for Samesame.com.au, and my little rant has finally appearede on line.

Yay!

See it in all it's glory here, or you if you're too lazy to click a fucking link, it's missing all it's pretty pictures and the video below;

Tim Minchin is not your usual comedian! He sits behind a piano, he likes to wear eye make up and his hair cut is part Simply Red’s Mick Hucknell and part emo. He’s appeared on ABC’s Spicks And Specks, as well as Denton’s Enough Rope. I walked into this show not knowing much about Minchin, but left entirely impressed.

The show started with a sight and sound assault, all without a single piano key being hit. Instead, Tim performs some great vocal gymnastics against a distorted guitar track to great effect. As the stage lights come back up, a barefoot Minchin is revealed standing in front of microphone, making fun of the late arrivals as they scatter to find their seats. Things then get very interesting when Minchin finally sits behind his piano and lets his material stray to the darker side of life.

His second song Taboo touches on some cringe worthy subjects – I’ll spare you the details as they’ll reveal the entire joke. The couple in front of me squirmed uncomfortably throughout the entire song, and their awkwardness continued throughout the show as Minchin too some very well placed swipes at mainstream religion, feminism, and his one true love, idealism.

While Minchin’s talents certainly lay behind the piano – he bashes on the keys like a child prodigy – he mixes it up with guitar, a few pre-recorded backing tracks and, for something completely different, a nine minute beat poem.

In fact, the beat poem is the show’s highlight. The lights come down as he stands in front of the microphone with a glass of red wine in hand, recalling a dinner party run-in with an ideologically offensive hippy called Storm. The poem is underpinned with a simple double bass backing track, and the vitriolic tirade against the politically naive, tree-hugging vegan kept the audience laughing for the entire nine minutes.

The final song, Bears Don’t Like To Dance pales in comparison to the beat poem, but with an audience member dressed in a bear suit for most of the song, it was pretty indicative of the entire show – you really had no idea where he was going, but there were plenty of laughs along the way.