CANBERRANS got used to calling Tim Omaji by his hip-hop name Timomatic, but these days as a leading stage performer, he’s better known by his birth name.

Either way, he’s “our Tim” and with the announcement that he’s going to play the role of Ike Turner in “Tina – The Tina Turner Musical,” he’s bigger than ever.

I caught up with Omaji by phone to Sydney, where he says he’s been based for 11 years.

Well not quite. He had a solid 18-month run playing Toulouse-Lautrec in “Moulin Rouge! The Musical”, which premiered in Melbourne last year.

But forget Sydney and Melbourne. Canberra is undoubtedly the place where he fine-tuned his art.

Arriving here as a 10-month-old from Nigeria after his dad got a scholarship to study sociology and criminology, he spent the first five years of his life in the ACT, later schooling in Perth and Darwin as he and the family followed his father‘s academic career.

He landed back in Canberra at Narrabundah College in year 12 and immediately started dancing and teaching with Francis Owusu’s youth empowerment organisation, Kulture Break.

“That nurtured me as an artist, especially in terms of entertainment and it also nurtured my love of stagecraft,” he says.

“Timomatic was my stage name for music, but Tim Omaji is my stage name for acting and my actual name.”

As Timomatic, he became well-known in Canberra as a break-dancer before branching out into singing, which had been part of his family life.

Omaji’s parents have now repatriated to Nigeria, but he tells me that because of his upbringing he feels that “my African heritage is part of me”.

“I grew up with music in a Nigerian household where music and the love of music is intrinsic to the culture. It makes you free,” he says.

With an academic father, it is unsurprising that on leaving school, he enrolled at the University of Canberra to study psychology and management, but dropped out after six months to pursue his interests with Kulture Break.

A move to Melbourne followed, after which in 2008 he did a diploma in vocal training at JMC Academy, then in 2009 auditioned for “So You Think You Can Dance”.

“That really introduced me to people in the industry and throughout Australia,” he says.

In 2010 he scored a role in “Fame: The Musical” in Melbourne, on the back of which he got into “Australia’s Got Talent” in 2011, an intro to the Australian music scene. He has since become a four-time platinum recording artist.

Later he would become a judge on “Australia’s Got Talent”, for which he won a Logie nomination – “it made me easy with audiences,” he says.

But it wasn’t until he got a role at Sydney’s Hayes Theatre in the musical “In the Heights” in 2018 that Omaji fell in love with the craft of acting and went on to study screen acting in Los Angeles and Sydney.

A role as Sam Onatou in the Australian season of “Madiba: The Musical” followed, then the part of Monty, the disco MC in “Saturday Night Fever” in 2019 at the Lyric Theatre in Sydney.

“Madiba” was supposed to go to America, but then covid struck, but it doesn’t seem to have fazed Omaji much.

“I created music, played a role in the Netflix mini-series “Clickbait”, which was filmed during covid and fell in love – I got a girlfriend,” he says. 

The role in “Moulin Rouge” followed and now he’s preparing for the part of a lifetime playing the intriguing Ike Turner.

“I play a character that has so much darkness, it’s a challenge to play a character like this,” Omaji says.

“Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” Theatre Royal Sydney, May 4-31.