Interview: Tony Award Nominee Tim Minchin Gears Up for The New York Comedy Festival and GROUNDHOG DAY!

Tim Minchin will not be put in a box. Though the composer is best known for his Tony-nominated score for the stage adaptation of Roald Dahl's "Matilda" as well as a series of hugely successful symphonic comedy tours, the man himself is living, breathing proof of the term, "Jack of all trades." Outside of his comedic and theatrical pursuits, Tim has also assumed the titles of actor, director, poet, and writer.

As an actor he has appeared on both stage and screen, most notably appearing in the role of Atticus Fetch in Showtime's, Californication and has been seen as Judas Iscariot in an arena production of Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice's Jesus Christ Superstar. He was awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters by The University of Western Australia (UWA), for his contributions to the arts. He was invited to give the "occasional address" at the graduation ceremony, a video of which which went viral. In 2014, Orion Publishing released a graphic novel of Minchin's beat poem, Storm. Created by DC Turner and Tracy King, the release followed a successful animated movie of the same piece which has been viewed well over three million times.

Self-described as being "obsessed with variety" Tim has built a career as interesting and unpredictable as the work he produces. In preparation for the upcoming Broadway premiere of his adaptation of the film "Groundhog Day", Tim is returning to New York for a one-night-only engagement at the Beacon Theater as part of the New York Comedy Festival. BroadwayWorld was able to speak with Tim on the eve of his performance to get his thoughts on his brief return to comedy, the highly-anticipated New York premiere of "Groundhog Day", how to avoid talking about Donald Trump on stage, and his dream to be part of a "Golden Age" of musical theatre. Read all of Tim's insightful, and often hilarious, insights in our interview below!

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Will this be your first show in a larger theater in New York? Because I know that you've played smaller venues here in the past.

I played tiny gigs, I played Feinstein's/54 Below like three years ago or something. It's weird how little I've played here. I played the New York Town Hall a few years ago. That was a pretty big gig. But this is my biggest gig. Although, it's part of a festival so its a bit different, but yeah this is a big gig for me. Especially these days. It didn't used to be a big gig for me but I kind of semi-retired or at least put everything on pause while I've been writing musicals. This is only my third gig for the year or something and certainly my first of this size. Not that that particularly worries me.

Based on your history of playing arenas, do you find that you prefer smaller venues like the Beacon?

I prefer small. I think the ultimate size for comedy is about a thousand seats in a quite dense room. But there's different things you get out of different rooms. Obviously when I was doing arenas and such, I took an orchestra with me because when you get to a certain level there's always going to be some promoter encouraging you to do bigger venues because you stand to make more and more money. I manage to do bigger venues without making more money because I figure if you're going to play a bigger venue, you might as well create a big show, which I love.

I look back on that with some pride because I set out to try and see how big you could make musical comedy and I think it was a pretty unusual sort of thing. But once I'd done that, that was it, really. I was really in comedy full-time for about five or six years. And once I did the orchestras, I thought, "Oh well, that's peaked." And since then I've really been concentrating on writing these musicals and directing a film, and that sort of thing. I certainly love performing live and would love to get back into it, but my going back on tour keeps getting put off as projects come up. I certainly think next time I tour I'll be staying under 2,000 seats and I'll probably go out solo or just with a small band. I certainly don't think that now that I've done orchestras that I'm going to carry around an orchestra with me for the rest of my life.

Going from playing such large arenas to a smaller theater like The Beacon is a pretty big jump. Obviously the show couldn't match the scale of the arena tour. The show description indicated that there might be more of a rock vibe to this engagement?

I have no idea. I have always, all through my career, had a bit a wink to the fact that I'm sort of a wannabe rock star, but I'm basically a cabaret artist, but my career took off when I stopped using the word. Because cabaret has come to mean people doing covers of musical theatre songs. That's what people think of. I do sometimes drop in a cover, but I'm a satirist and I do a lot of talk in between. But this will just be me and a piano, and I don't know what I'll do really. At some point on Thursday I'll write up a set list and I'll probably mostly do material, but sometimes I just talk.

It's interesting to play a comedy festival because the good thing about Australia and England is that I can sell a concert on my name and I can sort of do what I want. And I think that's the case in New York as well. The weird thing about playing a comedy festival is that there will be people coming to see comedy and the moments where I'm not trying to make people laugh may seem a little strange to them.But I'm kind of over worrying about that. I just get up and do what I do and do it as well as I possibly can and try to give people a really interesting, entertaining evening. I don't tend to decide on my set list until right before the show which stresses me out but I don't seem to be able to kick the habit of last-minute decisions. But yeah, I'll just be whacking a piano as hard as I can, basically.

You've traveled around quite a lot. Do you find that audiences in different places respond to certain aspects of your style more than others?

All my stuff is about sex and death and God really, so that's the joy of what I discovered when I left Australia eleven years ago is that my stuff translates really well. In recent years, the latter part of my comedy career, I started writing with a global market in mind and so I would make sure my stuff was border-crossing. I do talk mostly about ideas in the same way as if you listen to "Matilda" you can hear all the philosophy and social satire. [The song] "Loud" is a comment on anti-intellectualism, "Telly" is obviously a comment on pop culture, and there's all sorts of subtext in there about big social ideas and "Groundhog Day" is even more ideas-heavy and my comedy is the same.

I don't really get into local, transient politics. I don't usually write about ephemeral politics that won't be funny in months. Having said that, I did a show the night before last in Santa Barbara to kind of warm up for New York, and it is very, very hard to get up on stage in this country at the moment and not talk about that monstrous man that everyone talks about all the time. It's really weird to get up at a comedy gig and not talk about him, so I ended up talking about him and I don't know whether I'll feel compelled to talk about him in New York. I haven't written any material about him. As I've said I haven't written any comedy in six years and I'm not gigging all the time, so I'm not generatin g material. So if I do talk, I'll just be talking. So that begs the question, do we need another liberal, progressive, intellectual, pseudo-intellectual stating their hatred of Trump? So I think I'll just do my show and see what happens.

Having mentioned the election, a satirist could not be in a better position given the current political climate. Is there any new material we can expect in this show?

I literally haven't written any comedy since 2011 but I'm going to play a little bit of "Groundhog Day." Since that orchestra tour basically I've spent two years trying to revive my acting career and then "Groundhog Day" opened a few months ago and that was a massive, massive thing and very, very scary. But it worked out really well.

Speaking of "Groundhog Day", is there anything you can tell us about it? The notices in London were so terrific and we're all very excited for the New York production.

Broadway is a pretty scary place, but I'm really looking forward to it. And that's what this show is about really. When you write musicals and when you're not American, Broadway can feel a little sort of overwhelming. When "Matilda" opened, I kind of didn't understand it. I found it sort of scary with all the Tony season and stuff. All I wanted to do was put the show up and I was doing other things. I didn't come to the Tonys because I was onstage playing Judas in Australia at that point. And so, I kind of didn't embrace it properly. I kind of thought, "Oh, what's this fuss, just put the show on." But if you're going to go to the circus, you've got to enjoy the circus. You've got to buy your candy floss and peanuts and get the fuck into it. So with this show, I really want to say, "Alright, New York, let's do it this time." I'm going to come, I'm going to remind you all who I am, I'm going to do a little gig and start coming regularly, and I'm going to be a part of the carnival. And so that's my intention this year, to throw myself into it a bit more.

Do you find that you prefer writing musicals to your comedy work at this point?

Well, I was writing music for theatre from the time I was seventeen and started comedy when I was twenty-nine. I've always been a theatre guy. I'm totally obsessed with variety, I don't see myself as one thing. I'm a stage actor, and a screen actor, and a comedian, and a writer, and I'm obsessed with the variety of it. And I'm obsessed with the idea of having a long career and doing quality stuff. I love the work. I love the challenge of musical theatre. I'm very aware that I want to be a nice, sensible person who does good work, rather than being backed up in how famous I can get. So that's why I've tended toward staying behind the scenes and writing musical theatre. Especially when you get to work with someone like Matthew Warchus. Matthew is like my favorite person. I think he's an absolute brilliant man and a dear friend, so after "Matilda", he was like, "Well, what about 'Groundhog Day'?? And I was like, "Fuck yeah, dude."

What an incredible challenge to write songs for a day that happens over and over again, though.

I'm obsessed by it. All I care about is how you tell these stories with songs. I think you'll like the score, you'll recognize it as mine immediately. But it's different from "Matilda" and it's kind of funnier, but in a way it's more consumable because it's just about all of us. Musically it has more songs you can play on the radio. Which was not my intention, but you're talking about what it means to be a human, what it means to live and be a good person, so you end up with these quite big songs. Although, you know me, I don't really write these soaring Broadway ballads.

I think it's a really exciting era for musical theatre. I would love to be part of an era that has seen growth. I would love to play a tiny little role in musical theatre taking another step. I'be got really strong beliefs about what I care about in musical theatre, and they're not necessarily the same as everyone's, but if some of the audience agrees with me then that's f-ing awesome.