Five years ago, locked in our homes and isolated from our loved ones, we invented new rituals to keep ourselves sane. We baked bread. We played trivia with friends on Zoom. We replaced going to the theatre with binge-watching 237 episodes of medical drama Grey’s Anatomy – twice. (Or was that just me?)
And for many of us in New South Wales, the daily 11am coronavirus press conferences led by then-premier Gladys Berejiklian became sacred appointment television. Maybe it was the sense of intimacy lockdown fostered that sent so many into emotional upheaval when, in 2021, Berejiklian was found to have engaged in “serious corrupt conduct”, breaching public trust by failing to disclose a personal relationship with politician Daryl Maguire while overseeing funding to his electorate. The memes were vicious, funny and funereal.
And now there’s Gladys: A Musical Affair. Currently playing in multiple Sydney venues for the Sydney comedy festival ahead of a longer tour (yes, it will stop in Wagga Wagga, Maguire’s onetime electorate), this is a lean one hour that features some great composing, paired with a script that doesn’t even go Wikipedia-deep into its subject.
Created by Nick Rheinberger and Tia Wilson, who first introduced their Gladys – played by Wilson – in Watch and Act, a rock musical about the black summer bushfires (that number is reused for this show), this musical is framed as an investigation into the former premier. “Truth or lie? Truth or lie?” they sing at the top of the show, promising to get to the heart of the Icac scandal. Was Gladys a calculating politician pulling a fast one? Or was she led astray by “dodgy Daryl”?
Gladys is positioned as a “good girl” and a “swot”, rising through the ranks of power from her local Girl Guides to the Young Liberals in a song that takes us on a whistle-stop tour through her early life. “Good morning everybody” – her lockdown press conference catchphrase – is said so many times in this number and subsequent numbers that it ceases to be funny. But once she gets into politics, Gladys fumbles. She needs staffers mumbling facts into her ear; she starts her black summer presser claiming it’s going to be a great day in NSW; she moons over Maguire.
The songs are smartly shaped, mixing Oz-inflected rock, folk and zydeco (Wilson’s Gladys plays the accordion, and at one point Kerry Chant, played by Mel Wishart, even wears and plays a frottoir), moving with pleasant ease and pace. Rheinberger, who plays Maguire and onetime health minister Brad Hazzard, brings in a little banjo for Maguire and the bouzouki to nod to Gladys’s Armenian heritage. Rob Laurie, who plays Rural Fire Service commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons, among others, rounds out the sound with drums and keys.
But the musical structure around them is not as strong. There are only a couple of numbers that let us into Gladys’s inner life, but they sit awkwardly – not emotional revelation, but punctuation, after the events referenced in the songs have already occurred. We hear from Maguire directly in song before Gladys even gets a solo number, which places her, in musical terms, as a secondary character in her own story. We whiz past coronavirus and the discovery of corruption, relying on audience memories and audio grabs from news reports to fill in the gaps – which means the script doesn’t tell the story strongly enough to stand on its own. Apart from the songs themselves, it’s all very flimsy.
Maybe it’s not fair to judge a parody musical in a comedy festival for its strength as musical theatre, but its musical element is its strongest. As a vehicle for jokes, well, it’s crowd-pleasing if you don’t want your crowd to think. The musical’s comic choices are broad and not particularly sophisticated. Physical tics are over-exaggerated; there are an exhausting number of colourful blazers; a lot of comic weight is placed on Gladys’s apparent social and emotional naivete, which is low-hanging fruit for a woman in politics. The jokes, for the most part, choose convenience over cleverness, aiming for references that score knowing laughs of recognition over comic surprise.
So Gladys: A Musical Affair is not a good musical, and it’s not a good comedy show. But it probably could be, if there was more dramaturgical rigour applied to both its narrative and comic structures. As it stands right now, though, it’s disposable: a slightly-too-late political parody that sings but doesn’t zing.
Gladys: A Musical Affair is on at Concourse Chatswood on 18 May, Darling Quarter Theatre on 21 June and Laycock Street Community Theatre, Wyoming on 16 August.
