Waiting For My Real Life… is a comedy show with music – or maybe it’s the other way around. The show serves as a showcase for Men At Work’s Colin Hay to share some tales of his long (and, let’s not forget, hugely successful) career. There’s no band, no roadies running on with pre-tuned instruments – just Hay, four guitars and a microphone. Hay hasn’t installed a safety net and he doesn’t particularly need one.
A Scottish gent by way of Australia, Colin Hay is, undeniably, a natural storyteller. You get the sense that he holds court at any given dinner party when he talks of travelling on a private jet with Ringo or his run-in with Jerry Lee Lewis or the time he almost didn’t make it to the stage for the Sydney Olympics Closing Ceremony – with only a couple of billion people watching at home.
The self-deprecating material works, but the more traditional and observational stuff doesn’t quite fly – especially when he decides his hit song ‘Down Under’ ‘talks like a gay man’; and he proceeds to mince around the stage for a few brief moments. Are You Being Served? ended 30 years ago, Mr Hay. Oh, and while he laughs about almost everything, he’s still not laughing about that court case, just so you know.
Among all that patter, there’s plenty of music too. Hay opens the show with the rather beautiful ‘Wayfaring Sons’ before remarking that it was a hit ‘nowhere around the world’. But he does play his hits – ‘Who Can It Be Now?’, the aforementioned ‘Down Under’ and the song that gave this show its title, ‘Waiting For My Real Life To Begin’.
Hay has written some exceptional lyrics in his time and yet when he plays ‘Beautiful World’ it serves as a timely reminder that, when he wants to, he competes only with Des’ree (‘I’d rather have a piece of toast, watch the evening news’) in terms of ridiculousness.
While a very affable stage presence, Hay and his globe-trotting tales seem more like they belong between games on Spick and Specks then between songs at the Playhouse. None of the stories are terribly salacious, nor is it terribly shocking when an occasional F-bomb replaces a punchline. You can’t help but think that Hay is holding back the really good stuff, waiting for his memoirs to begin.
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Waiting For My Real Life…
By Colin Hay
Playhouse, Arts Centre, St Kilda Rd
Melbourne International Comedy Festival
www.comedyfestival.com.au
10 – 12 April
