“That’s the problem with the internet right now,” Minchin says, bringing up a subject – what he sees as the shallowness and untruthfulness of progressive politics – that he’ll return to later. Now put the C-word in a quote in a newspaper. “I could lean forward to you and say: ‘The trouble with you, Tom, is that you’re clearly a cunt’ … And you would hear from the juxtaposition of content and intent that I actually like you.” Now write the C-word down. Minchin is aware that some of what he says in interviews comes over badly, his humour sometimes flattened without the accompanying performance. There are micro shifts of tone, eye-widenings, manic grins, flirty pouts, all meant to signal his constantly modulating levels of seriousness. After years in that cauldron, most of what he utters is buried under layers of protective irony.
But he was trained on the British comedy circuit. In this, Minchin conforms to type: belief by the bucket-load and plenty of doubt. It is not unusual for artists to contain a combustible blend of high confidence and low self-esteem. Who ever says ‘too-morrow’?”Īndy Karl as Phil Connors in the original Groundhog Day musical at the Old Vic, London, 2016. He has flown to London for a fortnight of rehearsals, specifically to pepper the Groundhog Day cast with pedantic corrections. Minchin lives in Sydney with his wife and two children. Something is bugging him and when I ask what, he notes that the actors are singing “too-morrow” instead of “ta-morrow”. “Tomorrow / There will be sun!” goes the line they’re belting out. They’re being taught the musical’s opening number. From inside the rehearsal room, loud enough to boom through a soundproofed door, the new cast of Groundhog Day burst into song.
He is confident things will work out better this time. If you want to go there to make your moolah, then you can’t be surprised if you have a rough ride.”įittingly, given that Groundhog Day is a story about do-overs, Minchin and his collaborators will try to revive their beleaguered musical at the Old Vic in London next month. “Mamma Mia’s one of the highest-selling musicals ever … Broadway is not a measure of what is good, or not to me. “It’s not a meritocracy,” Minchin shrugs. Groundhog Day closed on Broadway in autumn 2017, after 200-odd performances, and has more or less sat in a drawer since. “When you make something so detailed, over so many thousands of hours, something you think is broadly appealing, about how we’re to be as people – and it doesn’t fly? That’s incredibly painful,” Minchin says.ĭressed today in muted colours, his famous untidy reddish hair tied back under a baseball cap, he lists the little catastrophes that hobbled Groundhog Day seven years ago: investors pulling out the choreographer falling ill a feeling of being rushed to New York after a strong London opening, before the show was quite ready.
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