There’s No One New Around You: The Tinder Musical

As part of the current Sydney Comedy Festival this great little show played for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it run. Which is a pity as this show deserves better exposure.

For those who don’t know, “Tinder” is a mobile phone app that lets its users find other suitable users, mainly for casual sex. The title comes from the message that pops-up when you exhaust all of your potential matches on the app.

Tinder calls itself a “dating app” (and some people do use it to find serious relationships), but that’s a bit like calling a brothel a blue-light disco. This show skewers the app and its users, and does it in a very entertaining way.

This is not a musical in the traditional sense that there are specific characters within a set linear story. It’s a revue-cabaret that presents songs and skits based on the theme of dating via Tinder.  We see the tropes and types that populate the online dating scene, e.g. people who look nothing like their profile pic, or say they are “looking for a partner in crime”.

The humour ranges from the pun-filled (the text-exchange between “Cliff” and “Tundra”) to the surreal (a woman who is only shown pics of a six-pack torso finally gets to meet him, and finds that “he” is actually nothing but a moving, talking, disembodied six-pack torso), to the ribald (a song about how sending pictures of your genitals can make the right impact).

It runs for a bit over an hour but don’t let the short time put you off: this show packs more punch, comment, and ideas in its hour than most shows that run twice as long. It’s a good sign of the authors’ talent and for the show when the authors know when to stop.

On that point the songs don’t suffer from what I call the “extra-verse curse”: where a song’s impact is ruined because the writer / dramaturg/ singer feels the need that just one more verse should be sung. The music is original, and is what I’d call jazz-pop-Sondheim – and I mean that as a compliment.

This may seem like a show with only limited appeal, but no. This show finds the universal in the specific. Yes it captures the zeitgeist of modern dating, but we see greater comment underneath about what relationships mean in this “me-obsessed” era, and the impact social media has on de-humanising us in the process.  e.g. a young man proudly sings of the virtues of his penis, and his pics of same, but can’t bring himself to say the  word “vagina.”

The only bit I felt was out of place was near the end, when the show dropped its comic veneer. It was midway through a profanity-laden rap-rant, where Tinder’s users expressed their frustration at the app for failing them. The song, aptly titled F*** You Tinder looked like it was about to crash in a dark place, but the performers brought it back into shiny happy funny land.

If you don’t do the dating scene, but ever become tempted, then after seeing this show you’d probably avoid using this app – or you may be better off going out alone and seeing a great little show like this one.

Here’s hoping word of mouth and good reviews gets this show a better and longer revival.

Clever, caustic fun.

Peter Novakovich