The great Covid-19-necessitated digital theatre experiment continues in Australia with Who’s Your Baghdaddy, a complicated digital production performed live each night. It’s disguised as a Zoom call, complete with fake footer prompting you to share your screen or end the meeting. But if the lighting erupted into a disco daze and faces started cascading over the screen with your coworkers like they do here, working from home would be infinitely more uncomfortable.
With Baghdaddy, that’s the point – the show starts in flippant reality with irreverent jokes and lighthearted denial, then uses surrealist flashback devices and technical effects to hint at a darker turmoil that will eventually take over. This is a musical that anticipates mass damage.
Its story is in the subtitle: How I Started the Iraq War. It hews close enough to the decisions that led the US government to elevate the testimony of Curveball (the cryptonym given to the Iraqi informant who, supposedly desperate to secure asylum in Germany, told authorities he had engineered weapons of mass destruction) into fact, despite evidence that cast major doubts on his story. Underneath corny rhymes and a reflexive use of humour as a couching vessel for horror, a growing theme emerges: pride, ego and passivity on the part of BND (the German Federal Intelligence Service, Bundesnachrichtendienst) and CIA agents allowed a likely – later definitively proven – false report to move up the chain.
Here, those agents are collapsed into just a few figures, each with their own crucial points of inaction. Martin (Doug Hansell) insists that his theories are correct over other evidence, which has terrible consequences. Tyler (Phillip Lowe), an intelligence company man, won’t push his superior to stop the process. Richart (Matthew Predny), a wet-behind-the-ears BND detective is determined to prove himself by handling Curveball (Troy Sussman), despite dangerous inexperience. Jerry (Adam Rennie) is a translator who knowingly lets slide an initial error – in spy-talk, apparently there’s a world of difference between “reliable” and “credible”. Finally there’s Berry (Laura Murphy): a Type-A, ambitious agent who uses this intel to climb the ladder of prestige. Blake Erickson and Katrina Retallick round out the cast in multiple roles – fast-talking agents from the State department, support group attendees, newscasters.
It sounds beautiful – Gooding’s cast is a stack of vocal powerhouses, and there’s no hint of video-call lag – and Steven Kreamer’s musical direction is assured. Leah Howard’s choreography travels from rooms of varying size housing each actor and is in partnership with Michael Goodyear’s technical direction; screen formations suggest and carry forward the contained motion of dance from each actor. The show does its best to transform the experience of theatre into a new realm. It’s a solid effort; on the show’s opening night, there was a dropped sound cue, and a glitch that started to run the show’s closing credits a few times during the opening number. But these aren’t real problems.
The problem is balance. It’s near-impossible to achieve it with a book that so nakedly needs to make us laugh – until suddenly it demands we cry. Marshall Pailet and AD Penedo, drawing from an unproduced screenplay by JT Allen, have built a robust score that swings from musical theatre pastiche to boy band, peppered with vaguely Orientalist musical references. It’s sometimes clever, often goofy, and only occasionally precise (“Das Man”, the I-want song for our baby BND agent Richart, satisfyingly slices his pride to the bone with Europop).
It’s a deeply American story – certainly it’s more damning to German Richart than American Berry and Jerry, who are given shimmering beats of unrequited love between bouts of intentionally embarrassing white rapping – but it falls down the hardest with Curveball. Sussman brings soulfulness to the part when he can, particularly in the second act, but the story doesn’t spend as much time granting us access to Curveball’s inner life – his wants, needs, desires. He remains as othered and as doubtful to us as he was to them, which does a disservice to the musical’s driving attempt to humanise the players across the board.
The musical works best when it directly tackles how complicity in harmful systems cause harm, and the framework of a support meeting roots that complicity in the mundane and makes it relatable. These are everyday battles between conscience and capital, whether it be financial, social, or cultural; this complicity perpetuates discrimination, conflict, and superficial rather than meaningful change. It’s infuriating and it’s devastating, and occasionally, Who’s Your Baghdaddy allows us to feel those things.
The problem is that, here, we don’t feel those things enough. It might be an easier sell in the physical space of theatre, where emotions flow through the air and audiences are ready for the journey, hearts open to the collective experience. Onscreen, despite a group meeting shifting easily to a digital context, in Gooding’s hands Baghdaddy leans heavily on cheekiness and slides too late into sincerity; without archness or the cynicism of absurdism in the playing style, it almost feels dismissive. It undermines itself.
• Who’s Your Baghdaddy? (Or How I Started the Iraq War) is streaming live online until 28 June
