First things first: Who’s Your Baghdaddy, Or How I Started the Iraq War is a broadly satirical, yet often lyric treatment of the leadup to the invasion, the fall of Saddam, and attendant chaos before and after 9/11. Initially framed as the memories shared within a support group (“Hi, I’m Jerry, and I started the Iraq War.” “Hi, Jerry”), flashbacks dramatize—and tuneful, peppy songs musicalize—an international comedy of errors in which operatives of multiple nations, and in turn their leaders, are persuaded that there are WMD to be found, and that bringing down a regime is the only logical response. As if!
Principally to blame, as Marshall Pailet and A.D. Penedo tell it, is the personal ambition of intelligence community operatives who believe that the confessions of the defector code-named “Curveball”—a self-described principal engineer of the weapons program—are their ticket to confirming their worst assumptions about bad international actors, not to mention building their own careers. “I deserve it too” is an often-repeated refrain, part of the self-talk of blinkered bureaucrats piously insisting that the world as they see it is the world that is.
The Australian theater collective Curveball Creative has staged the show in a socially distant fashion—more on that in a second—with nine talented performers and a terrific music and tech support team. And I have to confess it wore me out. Early on, and more and more thereafter. I suspect that four years of Trump Administration jabberwocky, particularly the last six months’ worth, have rendered me less than amenable to revisiting the follies of 20 years ago, particularly when they are served up with a thick layer of glib, kneejerk anti-Americanism and a refusal to see anyone’s motives in anything other than a cynical light. The pivot to seriousness in the eleventh hour strikes me as unearned and gratuitous.
And yet I’m fully willing to concede that it’s just me, and those with a strong appetite for the puckish/lightly rancid likes of The Big Short or Vice can confidently add a star or even two to this rating.
But to me, the big news is not the material but the staging, which takes online impresarioship much further than I’ve seen it demonstrated heretofore. (They didn’t use the Zoom platform, but theirs sure resembles it, albeit taken to the nth power.) As cast members’ windows enter and exit, swirling and rotating against interesting backgrounds or rear projections, Phoebe Pilder lights them creatively, shifting from green to pink to purple washes depending on the mood of the moment. Kind of reminiscent of the benighted color filters of the South Pacific movie, but subtler and more effective here. Clever sleight-of-hand is used to connect characters, as when intelligence folders are seemingly transferred from hand to hand to hand. Steven Kreamer’s musical direction, mixed live with the vocals, is first rate, and New York-based director Neil Gooding (he Skyped in!) keeps it all moving briskly.
The excellent cast’s curtain calls pull back to reveal the authenticity of the June streaming event and that everyone has been lit and photographed, as jungle documentaries used to boast, “in their own natural habitat.” The entire tech team takes deserved bows as well. Truly impressive and, I hope, inspiring for other producing groups. If only it all weren’t in aid of something so…dispiriting.
The Curveball Creative production of Who’s Your Baghdaddy is available for pay-per-view streaming indefinitely at www.baghdaddymusical.com.au. Beginning on Nov. 11, it will also be available at www.broadwayhd.com
