Comedy Reviews

It is rare that you turn up to a show expecting so little and end up loving it so much. Tim Minchin has that much talent to burn, he glows red-hot. The Melbourne-based performer is funnier than most comedians, plays better than most pianists, and sings with a voice any pop idol would be proud to own.
His act can loosely be described as black humour cabaret, but it’s more like one long hilarious ranting story told in song, interspersed with staccato bursts of hysterically funny dialogue.
His spoken word persona is a nervous type with deep-seated anger management problems. And his musical maestro side is full of power and scintillating one-liners.
It’s not for the faint-hearted, the religious or the easily offended.
He kicks off with an ode to his artificial girlfriend called Inflatable You. Next is a song about a well-educated piano-playing guy who wants to be a rock star but has no deep painful issues to use as his calling card. “Jeez, hate to be him”, Minchin says.
He’s so sick, slick and clever that it almost beggars belief. His wizardry with wordplay makes the mind boggle even as the ears burn. His fingers move across the keyboard like lightning, a high-velocity virtuosity matched only by the speed with which ideas tumble out of his mouth.
Sharp satire on stockbroking types with more money than sensitivity, and a twisted poem about his psychologist are next.
Then, just when we are in the palm of his hand, Minchin takes a turn towards the oddly earnest. A heartfelt ode to canvas shopping bags and a song explaining he, too, has a dark side, are still hilarious and yet honestly moving at the same time.
The final number, which encompasses the planet, the nation, his body and his brain in a beautifully poignant piece of songwriting, leaves us breathless.
Catch him quickly before he leaves town. This is one of the funniest and most amazing shows you’ll ever see.

Musical comedy has enjoyed a renaissance recently. First it was Paul McDermott fronting Gud, then came the middle class angst of Eddie Perfect, and in the latest batch are ivory-ticklers Sammy J and Tim Minchin. This group has a lot in common with their musical ancestors, performers including Victor Borg and Tom Lehrer. They are all highly accomplished musicians, but stand out for their remarkable verbal dexterity and the ability to fit the surprisingly complex requirements of comedy into the rigours of musical convention.
In a short space of time Tim Minchin has established himself as one of the best. He intuitively understands what makes funny funny, so every second line of his brilliant compositions is a laugh-out-loud punchline. The set up for each song is quite simple, but the ideas are mined sensationally for comic effect. Take Minchin’s song warning of the dangers of fat kids, a set up which then leaves him open to widely and hilariously speculate on the consequences. There are few things funnier in the world than Tim Minchin on a roll.
Minchin is as comfortable in front of the microphone as he is at his beloved piano. The format of this year’s show is just a little looser than his past two outings in Melbourne, which gives him more freedom for spontaneity. When he heard the cry of a newborn from the back of the room, Minchin went with the flow and was wonderfully successful: just what was the newborn expected to get out of the show, anyhow?
Minchin’s stage persona is oddly charming. Though the black trenchcoat, heavy eye makeup and gravity-defying hair might suggest an angry goth, once he opens his mouth Minchin is friendly and engaging. There’s a touch of nastiness to some of his material – taking on thalidomide kids, cot-death victims and the morbidly obese (who, incidentally, would make a sensational wrestling team together) – but it’s all said with a smile.
Later this year, Minchin is moving to London, so chances to see this musical genius in action might be limited. Catch him while you can.

Black – comedy, that is – is back with a vengeance as Melbourne’s own 2005 Perrier Award winner (Best Newcomer) from Edinburgh shows that another year’s experience on the stand-up circuit has worked wonders for his confidence.

From the rocking beginning and wondrous cabaret-style virtuosity to the boundary-pushing punchlines with all the subtlety of a sledge-hammer, this mega-talented piano man with an incisive and vast intellect to match hits all the right notes.

From perineums and canvas bags to matters of faith, this is one comedian with a conscience who delivers thought-provoking wit rather than smut. Raw yet accomplished, this is one show not to be missed.

4 stars.

“Last Year’s Festival Directors’ Award Winner Doesn’t Disappoint.”

TIM MINCHIN’S crazy cabaret won him a festival director’s award at last year’s Comedy Festival and best newcomer at the Edinburgh Fringe. High praise creates high expectations, and Minchin doesn’t disappoint.

He arrives on stage barefoot, in a suit buttoned all the way to the top, with hair teased wildly backward, as if he’s tried to stare down an industrial fan at close range. He looks like a cross between a concert pianist and Igor, the mad retainer from the Frankenstein movies.

This resemblance is reinforced by Minchin’s rapid and seemingly inexhaustible array of nervy expressions, including one half-squint, half-ogle that should by rights be anatomically impossible (if only on the grounds of taste). In short, he’s a man who can make you laugh before even singing a note.

What makes Minchin special is his versatility. As he yoyos between piano and mic, you’re struck by the fact that he’s simultaneously an excellent stand-up comedian, a purveyor of physical comedy, an accomplished musician and a lyricist of diabolical ingenuity.

The tunes range from pop pastiche and patter-songs through to the most unpleasant love ballad ever, animated by the same savagely satirical spirit. Witty, smart, and unabashedly offensive, the lyrics sound as if they were written by Noel Coward with his head in a microwave.

As for performance technique, Minchin doesn’t so much play the piano as attack it kung-fu style.

Minchin’s stand-up isn’t quite as good as his songs – the piano is clearly his comfort zone – but this experienced entertainer rebounds effortlessly from potential falls.

When his gags are good, they’re hilarious; when they’re bad, you get to watch Minchin haul his lead balloon across the stage and kick it into the wings, which is almost as funny.

4 stars.

With his creepy blue contact lenses, Robert Smith-goes-blond bird’s-nest hair and bare feet, wino-trenchcoat ensemble, Tim Minchin looks a little scary – well, scary enough for me to believe it when he says he’ll come around to the house of anyone penning a bad review of his one man show, Darkside, and drop an unpleasant present in their pot plants.
Fortunately, I (and my pot plants) don’t have too much to worry about because the hype that’s been building around Minchin’s blend of stand-up and musical comedy since his knock-’em-dead performances at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival is well deserved. He’s found a comic niche, a quirky persona and a confident routine that has reached the point of polished near-perfection.
There’s nothing too topical or rigorously intellectual about Minchin’s show; for the most part, it’s just silly, bawdy good fun.
He opens with a song praising the fuss-free joys of an inflatable doll, works his way through the plight of the rock’n’roll nerd – the type of guy who’s just too normal to ever taste the delights of the chicks’n’drugs lifestyle – and takes a hefty swipe at the condescending mentality of rich stockbrokers patronising (in both senses of the word) the artist.
If there’s anything linking Minchin’s routines, it’s less the subject matter than his clever lyrical wordsmithery, and the anxiety-laden, emotionally dysfunctional, slightly edgy persona he projects.
He mixes a kind of psychological frailty with a streak of barely suppressed rage against whatever he chooses to poke fun at, from corporate rock posturing to the pop psychology industry.
The weirdest thing about Minchin’s show is that every time a critical niggle enters my head – well it’s funny, but it’s not that deep – he throws out a song that, with the prescience of a mind-reader, sticks two fingers up at my expectations.
Literally seconds after I make a note about the show’s absence of biting political satire, Minchin launches into his ridiculous Middle East Peace Anthem, centred around the profound observation that neither Jews nor Muslims “eat pigs, so why not not eat pigs together?”
OK, OK, so comedians don’t have to make conscience-shattering political statements. But isn’t there some sort of message Minchin wants his audience to take with them when they leave?
Well as it turns out, yes – there is. With the simply lit stage mutating into an eye-popping attack of fluorescent “stadium rock” lights, Minchin adopts his best Bono pose, rips off his shirt and flings out the all-important Message for the Evening: please, please take your environmentally friendly canvas bags with you when you go to the supermarket.
What elevates Minchin’s comedy above the merely enjoyable is the remarkable musicianship that accompanies it. He can take on a range of vocal styles, play the piano with aplomb and pepper his show with references, respectful or otherwise, to everyone from Burt Bacharach, Elton John and Jerry Lee Lewis to Led Zeppelin, Pearl Jam and U2’s aforementioned posturing crusader Bono Vox.
But it’s his spoken-word, expletive-strewn “therapy poem” that is without doubt the show’s highlight, a Tourette syndrome tour de force of brilliant comic timing that, for the first time during the show, had me literally in stitches, with tears of laughter streaming down my face.
This was the clincher: nothing else he could do after it could possibly be as funny, but it didn’t need to be.
By this stage I’d well and truly converted to the Dark side.

5 Stars

It’s taken some time to get a proper London run out of Melbourne’s Tim Minchin since he left Edinburgh last summer as the highly deserving winner of Perrier’s Best Newcomer award. But it’s been worth the wait. This barefoot Sideshow Bob lookalike has only done stand-up for a couple of years but the marvellous collision of mirth and piano in this shoe places him as Victoria Wood’s darkly cerebral polar opposite.

Minchin has a CV that includes acting, bands, musical directorships and solo music work – and he is super at tinkling the ivories. As a songwriter, his strength lies in inventive detail and witty wordplay. Rock ‘n’ Roll Nerd – about a middle-class lad whose dangerless life robs his songs of depth – playfully hints at autobiography.

He also does a good line in mocking the music biz, religion and moneyed lefties. His delightful upbeat ditty, Anthem for Palestine, has lyrics to make you gasp. The hilariously egocentric Canvas Bags sees a rapping Minchin revel, arms outstretched, among disco lights and pre-recorded harmonies.

Rounding out the package is Minchin’s ability to keep the show tight. His playing is energetic, his between-song patter fun, low-key and brief. He even works a guitar and poetry into the show. Other comics will be writing their next Edinburgh shows now – here’s hoping Minchin has another in the (canvas) bag.

Malcolm Hay finds a star in the making at the Edinburgh Fringe

Take out a second mortgage, sell the car, and put the money on the safest bet you’ll ever make in this uncertain world: that Tim Minchin will be the next big thing in musical comedy. He’s a 29-year-old Australian who hadn’t appeared in the UK before he came to this year’s Edinurgh Fringe. In fact, he only took up comedy back home in Melbourne a couple of years ago. His solo show ‘Dark Side’ (at the Gilded Balloon), packed with so much energy and talent it’s bursting at the seams, should make Minchin a red-hot favoutire when the time comes for dishing out awards.

His sheer power and versatility as a pianist and singer are astounding. But it’s the fierce intelligence of his humour that makes Minchin so distinctive. It’s there, of course, in the lyrics – the Palestine Peace Anthem which offers a novel recipe for uniting Jews and Arabs, his song in praise of an inflatable doll, or the deeply sacreligious ‘Ten-Foot Cock and a Few Hundred Virgins’. It’s there, too, in the black comedy of his remarks between the songs. Minchin has lines that can bring tears to the eyes, although he undercuts even the faintest hint of sentimentality. This material is far too raw for mainstream television. But Minchin could take the show straight into the West End.

The Find of The Fringe

Looking like a cross between Struwwelpeter, the Cure’s Robert Smith and Hollywood’s idea of Mozart, Tim Minchin has come over from Australia to raise the roof at the Fringe. On piano, he has the fast-fingered grace of a prodigy. His lyrics are so sharp, they’d turn Sondheim green with envy. And what’s more, he’s very, very funny. He’s the find of the fest.

From the moment Minchin, furiously gyrating to thrashy warm-up music, tumbles off the stage, you know you’re in the presence of a comedy maestro. He brings his audience on-side within two shakes of his hairspray-saturated mane because he offsets musical assurance against an appealingly self-doubting persona, signalled in a wild-eyed look that is as scared as it is scary. Issuing hesitant, between-songs banter, this keyboard wizard looks most at ease when he retreats to his grand piano to hammer out dexterous ditties that alternate flippancy with deep feeling.

In Rock and Roll Nerd, a self-portrait in third person, Minchin pokes fun at the type of twentysomething who can’t give up on becoming Bono or Bowie; in Dark Side, he vents the frustration of a middle-class kid who had it too cushy to be uber-creative (“Daddy never came to my ballgame,” he wails).

Other songs broach the interminable nature of married life, offer a solution for the Arab-Israeli conflict, and issue an eco-rallying cry against plastic bags. There’s even a brilliant ballad to a blow-up doll. We’ll be hearing a lot more from this Antipodean wunderkind.

In the realm of music-comedy, it’s going to be Minchin’s year – but the competition is worth checking out, too.

5 stars

Tim Minchin is very Australian (and very proud of it), multi-talented and immensely funny. His act is a cocktail of comedy songs, stand up, with a twist of poetry thrown in for good measure. He can be manic but he also displays a softer side to charm the audience.

Blessed with a strong, melodious voice, he sings and plays piano with real skill, intensity and energy. Song topics vary from the virtues of the inflatable doll to the middle class rock and roll nerd, and even includes a peace anthem for Palestine. His stand up routines take in subjects as diverse as Sydney transexuals to bottled water. The song Darkside provides the powerful finale and, as with the words of all his songs, is a clever and subtle use of language.

This is a superb, unpredictable, roller coaster ride of entertainment that will keep you laughing from first to last.

“ALWAYS LOOK ON THE DARK SIDE OF LIFE” by Jonathan Trew

LOOKING like the bastard son of The Cure’s Robert Smith and Riff Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Australian comic, actor and musician Tim Minchin has the kind of slightly psychotic stage presence that frightens animals. There is something about the staring eyes, randomly barked obscenities and the fury with which he pounds his piano that hints at too much time spent in an isolated garret feeding his frustrations and nursing his grievances.

Dark Side is the name of his aptly titled show. A mix of satirical song, bleak humour and demon piano-playing, it’s a semi-autobiographical tale which explores how Minchin’s ambitions to be a rock star have been thwarted.

According to the various record companies who knocked him back, it was not because he didn’t have the musical chops but because he didn’t have enough neuroses. Being well-balanced just doesn’t sell, whereas well manufactured angst, as Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst profitably proved, is a cash cow. Minchin’s show is his two fingers to the music business, his defiant demonstration that he, too, can have a dark side.

“There are elements of biography in the show,” says Minchin. “When I was trying to be a rock or pop musician, I found the thing that differed between me and everybody else was that I couldn’t take myself that seriously. A few years ago I recorded an album and shopped it around a lot of record labels. There were a lot of positive responses to it but, and there is always a big but, they didn’t know how to handle some of the songs being funny and some of them being really serious. I feel that you don’t have to make your life into a dark, horrible pit to be an artist.”

The son of a surgeon, privately educated, happily married and with a fledgling career as an actor and theatrical composer, Minchin’s show sends up the assumption that rock musicians have to be born under a bad moon.

“I can’t pretend I had some shit childhood,” he says. “In the show, I do a bit called the ‘Angry Poem’, where I say my mother was a bitch and my daddy never came to my ball games. It’s all lies, but it’s me saying, what do you want me to say? You want a dark side? I can have a dark side: I’ll whinge about my dad not coming to my ball games.”

The show garnered rave reviews at the Melbourne Comedy Festival earlier this year and won the Festival Director’s Award. Although Minchin’s profile in the UK is low, he has a fair chance of replicating that success at Edinburgh.

A major selling point is that Dark Side is completely different from the hordes of straight stand-ups, sketch shows and improv groups that throng the Festival; not least because of Minchin’s skills on the piano. Rather than being a gimmick, his playing is an integral part of the show – as much of a character as he is. Surprisingly, he had little formal training.

“I did up to grade two piano and then I quit when I was eight,” he says. “My brother played guitar and I taught myself piano through guitar. I learnt how to play all the little riffs that my brother wanted like the organ intro to ‘Light My Fire’. Sheet music freaks me out, although I knew what the dots meant.”

Minchin downplays his prowess on the piano and reckons if was thrown in with a jazz band, he would quickly be found out as a fraud. He enjoys playing the instrument but it has always been a means to an end for him. “It’s for the gags. I love the fact that I am not just a comedian who can play an instrument a bit, but I can make a gag work because of the music.”

There is a thoughtful bent to Minchin’s show which marks him out from many of his peers. He worries potential audiences may wrongly perceive his show as only being ‘for people with an arts degree’. I point out that Festival Edinburgh is not exactly barren ground for a show by a man described by an Australian critic as the ‘thinking woman’s crumpet’.

“I do feel very comfortable in Edinburgh,” says Minchin. “I feel as if I have found the source of my ginger pubic hair. The source DNA of my Fanta pants.”

EVERY year, Fringe pilgrims quest for the Holy Grail of Edinburgh comedy — an act as astonishing as it is unknown. A sleeper hit you can help awaken interest in. Someone you can boast about having seen before he — or she, but usually he — got vaulted into the premier league. Last year it was Will Adamsdale’s mock-motivational lecture Jackson’s Way; the year before it was the US comic Demetri Martin. Both went on to win the Perrier Award.

This year, the early buzz has been swarming around Tim Minchin, an Australian who sings brilliant comedy songs. As he sits at his white baby grand piano, sprouting the sort of hairstyle that Jennifer Aniston might slide into if she decided that she wasn’t worth it any more, you realise you are in the presence of a simply wonderful musician.

Bill Bailey stand aside. Minchin is a genuine musical virtuoso, a classically trained pianist whose songs are constructed and sung with an attention to detail that would make Rufus Wainwright sit up and look nervous. And that’s even before we get to the jokes.

Who knew that there was still so much mileage in that old comic standby, the love song to a blow-up doll? He follows Inflatable You with something even better — Rock’n’ Roll Nerd, a lament for a late-twentysomething of Minchin’s general shape and size, a would-be rocker who is “a victim of his upper-middle-class upbringing/ He can’t sing about the hood or bling-bling . . . He prefers the Beatles to the Stones/ Stevie Wonder to the Ramones.”

Again, he sustains his assault on a potentially soft target by the sheer quantity and quality of his invention, loading sharp lines on to musical backings that would make a New York singer-songwriter weep with minor-chord covetousness.

But if Minchin cannot live up to his unasked-for role as saviour of the Fringe, it is because his stand-up does not captivate in the same way. More even than with Bailey, you want him to get on with the music.

Instead, he gets off his stool between each number to offer artfully awkward, shuffling observations about his muted relationship with his doctor dad, his happy marriage, how he envies his professional friends’ income while they envy his supposed “spiritual and geographical freedom”.

It’s decent stuff, but the troubled Minchin persona looks scrawny placed alongside his musical talents. The straight comedy does not conquer this 350-seater — yup, the Gilded Balloon boss Karen Koren is putting her money where her mouth is with this unknown Aussie — in the way the songs do.

And when you know what sensational stuff you could be getting instead, your tolerance level for the merely good starts to plummet.

HE APPEARS, looking like Edward Scissorhands – all Johnny Depp prettiness and ludicrous hair – and goes from nervous smile to manic breakdance in just under ten seconds. Then he goes to the piano and turns into the secret lovechild of Bill Bailey. Which is about as complimentary as I get to a comic at a keyboard. He plays like an angel, sings like the rock star he always wanted to be and has a devil of a sense of humour.

I have to write nice things, of course, as, in his opening song, he makes it quite clear he will do things to (to say nothing of in) my pot plants should I give him a bad review.

His songs range from the downright silly, through quirky, to genuinely, if weirdly, touching. He has something of an obsession with taking everything ad absurdum, which makes a few of his songs feel just slightly as if they are outstaying their welcome.

Much of his musical comedy plays with repetition and anticipation. But then he gets up to the mic and does a section of classic stand up about his father being a cancer specialist that is black and brilliant – and follows, a song later, with a section about his anger management therapy that reveals him to be a seriously, hilariously, impressive actor. He is also a terrific jazz performer and his Beat Poem is something I’d love to listen to again.

There cannot be an act ahead of us in Edinburgh that is this variegated. Minchin manages to be gently observational one minute, mordant and dark the next. He will sit barefoot at the piano and segue from something whimsical that sounds like it has been channelled through Boothby Graffoe to a number he introduces as being “about God and anal sex”.

Karen Koren, a woman with a serious eye for talent and a heart for encouraging it, discovered him ‘Down Under’. Minchin is an Aussie and this is his first gig in the UK. Dare I mention Perrier Best Newcomer this early in the Festival? I think I can. Koren has given him her biggest venue and a shiny white piano. He richly deserves it all. And more. This is an extraordinary performer.

(Kate Copstick – The Scotsman)

“Irreverent”, “potty mouthed”, “sophisticated” and “polysyllabic” are favourite terms of critics when reviewing ‘Dark Side’. After seeing Mr Minchin in action it’s not hard to see why. ‘Dark Side’ is a mix of pointed social comment, ribaldry, slapstick and song that cascades over the audience. Beat poetry fuses with anthems crying out for a stadium full of addled lighter bearing peaceniks. Anger at the world is interwoven with insights into Minchin’s romantic nature; all hidden behind the facade of a rock’n’roll nerd trapped in a classically trained body. Best of all, the audience is kept enthralled and constantly amused by the quirky base lyrics set to impeccably tinkled melodies.

Minchin is articulate, with an obvious love of language, entendre and a keen interest in anatomy. He gets away with heathen attacks on the “doctrines of monotheistic religions” in his ditty 10 Foot Cock And A Few Hundred Virgins by his simple virtues of charm, a good voice and the manner of a lovable little scamp. He writes love songs for the lonely, the repressed and the perverse with songs ranging from extolling the virtues of cavorting with “the delectable, inflatable you” to the joy of pain.

Minchin maintains a curious mix of world weary cynicism and hopeful optimism best espoused by his Live Aid/8 peace offering to the Israeli and Palestinian peoples with its simple refrain of “We don’t eat pigs, You don’t eat pigs, Why don’t we not eat pigs together?” A simple solution to a complex problem but as Minchin paraphrases, every answer is the basis of another fucked up cliche.

Part stand-up, part gig, ‘Dark Side’ is fantastic cabaret; ideally suited to late venues and patrons with all that this entails. ‘Dark Side’ is a series of seemingly unconnected vignettes but a show that enables the audience to make its own connections while having a hearty belly laugh, a titter and beer.

(Darien O’Reilly – DB Magazine)

“The bare-footed stylings of new hipster cabaret cannot possibly get any better than Tim Minchin’s Dark Side. Musical savants turned comedians are crawling out of the woodwork these days, toting VCA degrees, piercings and alt rage, but Minchin is a cut above. His angry piano bar tuned are funny as hell and his sardonic showmanship is surprisingly understated. I hate this school of comedy – the sly finger-clicks of the ironically self-aware, jazzed up indie kid – but I loved Tim Minchin.

Dark Side opened with a spot of interpretive dance before Minchin settled into a protracted Cole Porter-esque ode to his inflatable girlfriend. Not something that sounds particularly funny on paper, granted, but delivered with singular charm that somehow capitalised on and at the same time avoided the cloying, theatrical ivory-tinkle of Manilow and his kind. But it wasn’t until after a brief lull involving apt but unfunny mime that Minchin really exploded on the crowd, with hit after hit of wise, wicked and joyfully hateful tunes that made me laugh so hard I snorted.

The whole audience was giddy, as it happens; unusually vocal and high-spirited (or high on spirits in the case of one unnecessarily chatty little fucker), so that when Minchin started an unassuming little beer hall sing-along, they were chorusing with him by the second round. This particular musical joke, a peace anthem for Palestine and Israel involving the words ‘we don’t eat pigs, you don’t eat pigs’ was a highlight in a show full of gold. Even the beat poetry, which generally makes my skin crawl, was a masterwork of savage wit in rhyming couplets. By the time he closed the show with a heartfelt, Ben Foldsy, small-boy-in-a-big-world ballad, Tim Minchin was my new favourite thing.

Brilliant.”

(Beat Magazine)

“Tim Minchin is such a brilliant virtuoso pianist, it would be a pleasure to simply listen to him play for an hour. Any incidental comedy, you could consider a bonus.

But, as it turns out, he’s not only an immensely talented musician, he’s also a bright, quirky and hugely entertaining comedian, too. It’s the sort of all-round package of genius that could drive other comics furious with envy.

On the face of it, what he sets out to do can sound very ordinary; which makes the fact he creates something extraordinary all the more remarkable. How many disappointing student-grade hacks might tackle a comic song about an inflatable sex doll with painfully predictable results? Well, this unedifying topic is the subject of his second song, performed in a cocktail-lounge jazz style, and it’s unexpectedly wonderful.

Minchin’s main strength is that he writes proper songs, with heartfelt passion and based on sharp, intelligent observations. He puts his personal view of the world first and moulding the jokes around it, the same approach that makes a stand-up sharing their world view infinitely better than some cracker of old gags.

Combine this distinctive approach with lyrics written with a poet’s imagery, vocabulary and rhythm and you have songs with a rare depth and texture. To call them simply comedy songs would be an insult; they are thoughtful songs that happen to be hilariously funny.

But this is not all he does, in a show that never loses its ability to surprise. Not only does he mix the musical styles, he mixes the comedic ones too. There’s a bit of slapstick, a more straightforward stand-up routine about playing air instruments (the only point of the show that dips from the inspired to merely being ‘pretty good’), and a poem fabulously recited through Minchin’s increasing mental instability.

In Dark Side, he’s not afraid to confront his own frustrations and inadequacies – all for devastating comic effect, of course. Indeed, its good to hear that he has got inadequacies – for he’s lacking absolutely nothing in the talent department, as even the most casual look at his fine work will attest. Impeccable stuff.”

(Steve Bennett, www.chortle.co.uk)