Australia’s musical theatre industry is small, but before Squabbalogic it was decidedly smaller. Founded by director, producer, writer and performer Jay James-Moody in 2006, the company was instrumental in establishing a boutique, director-led trend of small but mighty productions of modern musicals that would never sustain a tour of the country’s biggest theatres (Carrie, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson) – and reinvigorated classics (the original, grittier Grease; Man of La Mancha) for new audiences.
Squabbalogic – and companies like it – offered an alternative to out-of-the-box Broadway replicas and threw down a challenge to the industry: could we make room for innovation between rounds of Les Mis and Cats? The industry listened, and Squabbalogic was a co-founder of the Hayes Theatre Co in Sydney, now widely known as Australia’s home for this approach to song-and-dance stories.
Squabbalogic switched its focus to creating original Australian work; the company first previewed The Dismissal in 2019. The season lasted less than a week, but this rough-around-the-edges tryout of a musical about the constitutional crisis of 1975 (resulting in the dismissal of prime minister Gough Whitam) ignited the industry and audiences alike. It was exciting. It was funny. The songs (music and lyrics by Laura Murphy) were a clever pastiche of Oz pop-rock and bright Broadway melodies. Whitlam sounded like Farnesy, Malcolm Fraser was a Disney villain, and governor general John Kerr was caught between their competing interests. All this before the Palace Letters had even been made public.
Finally, after a bumpy road to the stage (a 2021 season was cancelled due to Covid-19 lockdowns), The Dismissal is back in the same theatre where it held its preview season: the York, at the Seymour Centre.
The musical (with a book by Blake Erickson and James-Moody) is fuelled by a distinctly local comic sensibility that you can trace back to the Tivoli Circuit and see most often now in TV sketch shows and loosely structured comedies like the ABC’s Black Comedy, Seven’s We Interrupt This Broadcast, and Network 10’s Thank God You’re Here. It lives on in theatre via musical comedies such as Casey Bennetto’s Keating!
Like these, The Dismissal switches styles from number to number to suit a joke, and Murphy’s music keeps them all afloat. Scenes are stuffed with anachronistic pop culture references just to get a laugh. It also loves to chase a bit – whether that’s portraying Sir Garfield Barwick as a demon (every time he appears on stage – played deliciously by Peter Carroll – it’s amid a puff of smoke) or showing the shifting loyalties of Sir John Kerr (Octavia Barron-Martin, brilliant) as a seduction. Fraser – played with mastermind calm by Andrew Cutcliffe – leads his cronies in a boyband-style ode to private school boys. Norman Gunston, the satirical TV character created by Garry McDonald in the 1970s (played here by Matthew Whittet), is the narrator.
Not all of the jokes land, but a great many do. This is a funny-above-all-else show and is often a real delight, especially in the first act. But, four years on from that initial tryout, it’s still messy. The last third of the first act, and the end of the second, drag. The book is overstuffed with side characters that could have been streamlined, reduced or cut. In its rush to get to the juicy backdoor shenanigans of the Liberal party, it never quite establishes the stakes of the showdown between Fraser and Whitlam.
Two early songs about Whitlam – Maintain Your Rage and Rain Down Under – are genuinely exciting, smart and effective musical numbers which tap into the momentum of public support for the left-leaning PM after 20 years of Liberal party leadership. Played powerfully by Justin Smith – reprising his role from the first tryout – Whitlam is a classic protagonist: brilliant (perhaps too much for his own good), charismatic, arrogant, and often right. He’s skilfully deployed in the structure of the musical: everything calms down when he arrives, the action re-orienting around him.
But the musical often takes narrative shortcuts that leave things a little emptier. The achievements of Whitlam’s first 10 days in office – withdrawing troops from the Vietnam war, ending conscription, eliminating taxes on contraception, and much more – are quickly and wordlessly shown in a slideshow that’s hard to read against the set’s curtains. Without committing those wins to song, the machinations of the right feel pettier and less pointed – and, in the language of musicals, less important than the action that follows.
But maybe that’s the point. At the end of The Dismissal’s madcap journey – stuffed full of back-door deals, royalty (Monique Salle’s brief turn as Queen Elizabeth II has her drowning out Kerr’s letters with loud “la la las” for plausible deniability) and colourful minor characters like minerals and energy minister Rex Connor (Georgie Bolton) – what’s left is a series of bits played out on the political stage. Ultimately, The Dismissal seems to say: it’s all just a circus, and does it all even matter? Does Australia ever really change?
One show doesn’t have to hold our nation’s entire political identity; there will be more shows with more to say. Perhaps it’s fine to just acknowledge the inertia and find ways to laugh about it – and in the process, kick the proverbial musical theatre can a little further down the road.
