Australian composer Tim Minchin makes Matilda the Musical sing

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Not one but three Matildas waltzed onto the stage this past Tuesday afternoon at Toronto's Ed Mirvish Theatre, where media rabble, chatty half-pints and Mirvish season subscribers gathered for a short, upbeat presentation. The occasion was the unveiling of the all-Canadian cast of Matilda the Musical, a theatre success story coming to town in July.

Actor Dan Chameroy hammed as the event's smart-aleck host; producer David Mirvish hawed as the big kahuna, reading from notes when he said the musical based on the book by Roald Dahl had taken his breath away when he first saw it in London. "We knew," he said evenly, "we had to have it."

And while the munchkins rotating in the title role – lookalikes Hannah Levinson, Jaime MacLean and Jenna Weir – were adorable, the star of the show was Tim Minchin, the witty Australian composer and keyboard-based comic who earned a Tony nomination for the musical's lyrics and music.

Interviewed on stage by Chameroy (who will play the role of the tyrannical head mistress Miss Trunchbull in the story of a precocious, up-punching schoolgirl with telekinetic powers), the affable Minchin vouched for this country's Prime Minister – "He's just the liberal dream, isn't he?" – and performed on the piano, singing the poignant ballad Quiet, about warm, still places in the eye of the storm.

On a pair of other numbers, Minchin played while a child actress from the touring version of the hit musical sang. But Quiet he handled alone. Prior to the launch event, when I sat down with Minchin, I had asked him about that song in particular. Did he identify with it and the character Matilda, who at times found all the knowledge and thoughts in her brain too hard to handle?

"I think we all do," said Minchin, stretching the sentence upward in a McCartney-esque lilt. "It must be very busy inside Matilda's head, and I think we all feel the same way. We're obliged to, or sucked into, taking in huge amounts of information."

As a cabaret-style comedian and musical satirist, the wild-haired, kohl-eyed Minchin is known for wordy, bite-y and melodious rants about his secular, scientific world view. In person, sitting on the mezzanine level of the theatre's grand lounge, he presents as thoughtful and mellow, if a little worn down. He just flew in from Los Angeles, where he now lives and where, on Monday, he'll starting working in earnest on a new play, a stage-musical version of the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day.

Minchin's relationship with musicals is a curious one. He grew up watching a lot of Gilbert and Sullivan – "I think it had a lot to do with my packing a lot of syllables into short spaces" – and is self-taught. He says he's not a Sondheim fetishist. "I know and understand him to be brilliant, but I'm probably more influenced by the Kinks than I am by him."

But while Minchin, 40, wrote university-production scores in Australia in his late teens and early 20s, his comedy career took him away from theatre. "I hadn't seen a musical for 10 years before I wrote Matilda," he says. "I couldn't afford to."

Well, actually, he could. In his persona as a glam-rock dandy, Minchin fills 10,000-seaters in England. It was at London's Bloomsbury Theatre where director Matthew Warchus, asked by the Royal Shakespeare Company to stage a musical Matilda, caught Minchin's ribald one-man show. There Warchus heard Minchin rhyme "inflatable" with "fellatable," but also heard enough heart to be convinced that Minchin had both the naughty and the nice, the laughter with the tears.

Matilda the Musical went on to win oodles of major awards and acclaim on both side of the Atlantic, and in 2012, the atheist Minchin went on to play his dream role of Judas in a touring production of Jesus Christ Superstar. A year later, he was cast as a coked-up and inappropriately naked rock star in the Showtime series Californication.

He takes none of his success for granted. "When I get time to look up," he says, "and try to imagine what 28-year-old me would think about me over the past 10 years, there's no lottery win that would come close."

Interview wrapping up, Minchin says about his struggling days in Perth and Melbourne, "My level of self-belief was tiny, and yet not so small that I was going to give up."

Later, on stage, the Matilda launch ends with a song that begins with an empowering line, "When I grow up, I will be tall enough to reach the branches that I need to reach to climb the trees you get to climb when you're grown up." The audience applauds, cast members bow and Minchin beams – an occasion for ovation on a midweek afternoon.

Matilda opens July 5 at the Ed Mirvish Theatre in Toronto (mirvish.com).