The Gladys Berejiklian Musical
An in-depth analysis of Gladys: A Musical Affair, and the politics that led to it
Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice — a film about Donald Trump’s rise as a businessman in 1970s New York under the tutelage of Roy Cohn — has recently premiered in cinemas. Despite struggles to find a distributor, it is being screened in the United States in October 2024, the month before the presidential election which may very well see Trump returned to the White House.
The Apprentice is not a film that portrays Donald Trump in a positive light. We watch him verbally abuse his alcoholic younger brother, actually just rape his wife Ivana, and kick a terminal AIDS patient onto the street.
When the film premiered at Cannes, Trump’s campaign threatened to sue. Abbasi responded by offering to personally screen the movie for Donald Trump, being quoted as saying “I don’t necessarily think that this is a movie he would dislike”.
And the crazy thing is, after seeing The Apprentice, I think Abbasi has a point. I think it would be very easy to, if you are Donald Trump (a morally bankrupt xenophobic rapist) come out of The Apprentice seeing it as a sort of American success story.
The Apprentice is, obviously, a searing indictment of Cohn and Trump’s way of thinking — constantly attacking, lying, stopping at nothing to gain profit, wealth, and power. It’s not subtle in the slightest. But through film-Trump’s dichotomy of “killers” and “losers”, you can see a narrative throughline of strength. The Apprentice’s Trump may engage in shocking cruelty, but it’d be easy for the real Trump to see it and declare himself a winner.
You might wonder what exactly this has to do with a musical about Gladys Berejiklian. I bring up The Apprentice because it makes me wonder — why make art about a contemporary politician? Surely everyone who’s seen it has already made up their mind. That’s the failing of so, so much media about Trump — it assumes you already hate him and is more or less just preaching to the choir.
There’s a musical about Paul Keating, for example. I haven’t seen it. From what I’ve heard, it’s a bit of a Labor wankfest. It goes on and on about how good and awesome he is. And that’s a good reason to make art about a politician — because you love them. I think you’d have to be a bit fucked in the head to think that Paul Keating is one of the greatest leaders this nation’s ever had, but I digress.
When I read an article in The Guardian about Gladys: A Musical Affair, I was almost immediately enraptured. It promised “nostalgia for those long languid days of lockdown”, and features “dastardly Daryl” as a country music-playing villain.
The article closes with an invitation for Gladys Berejiklian herself to come and see the musical (which, to my knowledge, she has not). Nick Rheinberger — who composed the music and lyrics in Gladys: A Musical Affair, promises that “there’s still a ticket waiting for a former premier if they want it”.
It’s not quite Abbasi offering an ex-President a private screening. But it stuck with me after I’d finished seeing the play. Would Berejiklian enjoy Gladys: A Musical Affair?
The COVID-19 pandemic was — is? — a really deeply strange time. I’m not going to act like it was some massive collective trauma (see this article below by friend of the blog Lucy for more on that) we’re all still struggling to recover from, but it was profoundly weird.
That being said, some sort of profound collective delusion is the only explanation I can muster for why the Governor of Kentucky suddenly became a sex symbol. In a time of great uncertainty, a lot of us looked to our elected leaders for assurance and stability. When coupled with a half-competent pairing of the pandemic and good timing, this could lead to romping election victories, such as Mark McGowan’s Western Australia landslide in 2021.
And in my home state of Victoria, there certainly were a lot of people who felt that way about Daniel Andrews, the Premier at the time. Some of them were very passionate indeed.
But I’m going to bet that when you think of the name Daniel Andrews, you probably don’t think of the legions of Victorians who admired him as a face of stability in very uncertain times, who protected the state from a mass outbreak of COVID-19.
You don’t think of him as a popular leader. You think of “Dictator Dan”, of helicopters over playgrounds, of pregnant mums being arrested, of the most unpopular Premier in history. That’s the narrative that a big chunk of the media, and the Victorian Liberal Party, desperately wanted to believe was true.
This narrative has managed to survive his overwhelming re-election victory, to the point where, even a year after his resignation, people are still writing articles about how the Labor Party needs to break free from his shadow.1
It’s all very maddening and out of touch with reality, no matter your thoughts on Daniel Andrews. The man served the Victorian Liberals two consecutive drubbings and yet I’m expected to believe he’s this deeply unpopular albatross around the party’s neck. Bullshit.
So when you look above the Murray, you might expect that the Premier of New South Wales — a state which also spent big chunks of 2020 and 2021 going in and out of lockdown — might be similarly viewed in the public conception.
A sort of narrative has emerged around Gladys Berejiklian, who was the Liberal Premier of New South Wales from 2017 to 2021. That she was a very popular Premier, who bravely led her state through the COVID-19 pandemic, and was ultimately vanquished by a simple failure of judgement.
She had a bad boyfriend, and a trumped-up anti-corruption commission — more or less a witch hunt — exhumed the petty details of her personal life and romantic failings, and used it to end the career of a woman who was probably no more guilty than you or I.
The then-Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, more or less said these exact words when arguing against a federal anti-corruption commission. There was a sustained campaign from many prominent Liberal politicians to get her to stand for the seat of Warringah after her resignation, all of whom rubbished any possible findings of corruption.
It wasn’t just Liberal apparatchiks. Even after the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) found that she had breached the public trust, a majority of New South Wales voters still were found in a poll to “like and respect” her. About 40% thought she should never have resigned.
This is insane. She didn’t just have a boyfriend who happened to be doing corrupt stuff, she actively helped! She promised to get him funding for hospitals in his electorate! She never disclosed the fact that they were in a relationship until after he left Parliament!
Perhaps you don’t think this rises to the level of corruption. She didn’t take money in bags. She never had a lobster dinner with a mafia boss. She wasn’t taking out hits on her political opponents. But she wasn’t a victim of circumstance. She was the Premier of New South Wales, and she absolutely should have known better at the very least.
All of this is why I was, as I said earlier, immediately fascinated by Gladys: A Musical Affair. The article in The Guardian I mentioned frames the musical as “part parody, part satire”, and the creators emphasise the complexity of Gladys Berejiklian’s story.
Gladys: A Musical Affair was not playing in Melbourne, because of course it fucking wasn’t. When I read that article, all of its showings in Sydney were sold out. But the creators of the play were taking it to the regions of New South Wales.
So I did the only rational thing and booked a ticket to see Gladys: A Musical Affair in the town of Bowral on the 12th of October.
I got there about 5 minutes before doors, leaving me 40 minutes until the play started. It was quite an intimate environment — it was a small little room and we were all seated at less than a dozen tables circling the stage. For a moment, I had the thought that what I was doing was quite mean-spirited.
Because in all honesty, I expected this musical to be quite bad. I expected to disagree with it politically and to find it a load of self-impressed, barely disguised Liberal Party apologia that barely passed as worthy of artistic analysis.
And this feels needlessly cruel. I had a brief conversation with one of the guys who made it, and he seemed nice enough. Unless the play ended with “and this is why we should’ve voted in Fraser Anning” it really didn’t feel warranted to just tear it to shreds.
So I’ve laid out my political priors. Let me tell you about Gladys: A Musical Affair.
The musical starts with a montage of various news clips and politicians talking about Gladys. The last one I remember hearing was a woman wishing that we had her back, before the first musical number, “Truth or Lie”, begins.
We are introduced to an accordion-playing Gladys Berejiklian, played by Tia Wilson, who clarifies that although Berejiklian never played the accordion, her background as a former Young Liberal president and a woman who had her first boyfriend at 43 gave her “accordion playing vibes”.
Aside from Wilson, the other 3 actors/performers/musicians in this musical are all doing double duty. The previously mentioned Nick Rheinberger is both health minister Brad Hazzard and “dodgy” Daryl Maguire. Mel Wishart plays Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant and later ICAC commissioner Ruth McColl, while Rob Laurie plays chief firie Shane Fitzsimmons and Scott Robertson, who grilled Gladys at ICAC.
I think I spent most of this opening number with my jaw agape. We learn that Gladys only spoke Armenian until age 5, and she tells us some Armenian words, including barab glir, the Armenian for “empty dick”. It was well-performed, for sure, but it seemed to set the stage for the full-on Gladys apologia I had feared.
“Right Track” follows, showing us Gladys’ rise to power. There’s some offhand comments about her fighting the left but not really any serious critique. It’s all fun, as you’d expect. Then, we are introduced to Gladys’ Armenian parents, played by Wishart and McColl. They bring out two Armenian suitors for Gladys, played by Rheinberger, before she settles on, of course, Dodgy Daryl.
As we are introduced to Rheinberger’s Maguire, I heard an audible “don’t do it!” uttered from behind me. This was, of course, a killer anecdote, which is why I mention it here. But the people behind me happened to mutter similar Gladys-supporting things for the rest of the show, so perhaps it’s not representative of how the whole audience recieved it. And also, I’m sorry to these people that you happened to be sitting on the same table as a dickhead with a blog.
After this, we’re launched into the crises that came to define Gladys’ premiership. First, the bushfires of late 2019/early 2020, and then COVID. What was most jarring about this for me is, after the introduction to COVID, Wilson’s Gladys almost immediately starts talking about anti-vaccine nuts.
Which, yeah, fuck those people, but that’s not what we were worried about during lockdown! A big part of Gladys’ positive reputation is her handling of the pandemic which was, you know, fine, but it was so shocking to me to see the first mention of it be something about vaccines and not lockdowns or whatever. The vaccines should come later!
If not just shoddy writing, perhaps this speaks to a sort of collective amnesia. We want to remember Gladys as a hero of lockdown, the Premier who led us through the pandemic. But we don’t want to actually remember the pandemic. That stuff was a blur. Just throw in some stuff about vaccines, people will know what we mean.
Anyway, then we get a musical routine about Gladys’ daily press conferences accompanied by castanets as we run through a sort of supercut of various COVID restrictions — stay-at-home mandates, etc. It’s fun, I suppose. I remembered the castanets, that’s gotta count for something.
I want to avoid doing a blow-by-blow of this entire damn musical, but really what fascinated me most was the ending. After we watch Daryl and Gladys get grilled by ICAC, Gladys wonders to herself how she’s going to get out of this mess. We hear crosstalk from audio about what could be done.
Before we watch Gladys perform a song about how wronged she’s been, we hear someone suggest that she should run with the bad boyfriend narrative, get a sympathetic female journalist from the Daily Telegraph, because everyone has a bad boyfriend.
This is one of the few moments where I feel this musical really touches on the complexity it supposedly promised. Deep analysis of Gladys: A Musical Affair feels silly — it’s mainly an excuse to sing songs, which are admittedly good — but it gets to the point that making unwise personal decisions is not the same thing as corruption, and there was a sustained public narrative to conflate the two.
And then we get the actual closing number in which Gladys resigns, declares that “a woman in power is not allowed to fail”, and mutters the Armenian for “empty dick” a bunch of times.
Returning back to my initial point — what would Gladys Berejiklian think of this if she saw it? I think she’d probably have fun with it. She doesn’t strike me as the sort of person who is hypersensitive to any sort of parody or criticism, and what Gladys: A Musical Affair offers is pretty mild anyway.
And as I mentioned, the mere fact that someone you made art about could enjoy what you created isn’t an indictment of your work. But as I left Gladys: A Musical Affair, I heard theatregoers chatting about how wronged she’d been. It was a mistake anyone could have made, after all.
Perhaps “audience for people who would see a musical about Gladys Berejiklian” is a self-selecting sample of people who already like Gladys Berejiklian. But if you don’t like her, as I don’t — or even if you don’t know anything about her — I think you’d probably walk away with a more positive impression of her.
And that’s not because the people who made this are soulless Liberal Party hacks. They’re talented actors and musicians, even if I cringed at the line about Daryl saying he was in a situationship. I buy what they said when they say that they are conflicted about Gladys, that they view her story as complex.
But what they have made is a puff piece for Gladys Berejiklian. And look, she’s in the private sector now, she might never work in politics again, I’m not going to say I’m outraged at that. But as someone who’s Premier was not Gladys Berejiklian, this was such a deeply strange, foreign experience to see.
I mention collective amnesia earlier, and I really think this musical is a testament to that. Nothing about Berejiklian’s tenure as Premier was particularly remarkable to me, other than the fact that she happened to be Premier throughout the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
She made good decisions in the interest of public health and the collective good — but so did most every other Australian Premier. Her resignation happened at almost the perfect time to make her a martyr, being positioned right at the end of New South Wales’ lockdown in October 2021. People left flowers at her office. 70,000 people signed a petition to make her Premier again.
Most of the leaders Australia saw during the COVID-19 pandemic were either hard-nosed Labor politicians, like McGowan or Andrews, or uncaring, negligent Liberal politicians like Scott Morrison.
For a certain type of person, Gladys Berejiklian hit a sweet spot. She was not nakedly incompetent, and in fact her handling of the COVID-19 pandemic probably saved lives, especially in contrast to what a Scott Morrison would have done in her position.
But she also never appeared as cruel, harsh, or tyrannical. Part of this was because it was in no-one’s interest to paint her as such — the federal Liberals were aligned with her politically, and other Labor premiers needed to cooperate with her as part of managing the pandemic.
With this backdrop, the state Labor opposition basically accepted that her managing of the pandemic was perfect. They were in lockstep behind her as she reopened the state, and as she was found to have engaged in corrupt behaviour, Labor Premier Chris Minns hailed her COVID management as “exemplary”.
And thus, Berejiklian became a figure of bipartisan approval. Labor politicians might not have joined the Liberals in using her as an excuse to sledge ICAC, but they still broadly baulked at criticising her. There’s a sense of “but for the grace of God go I” in her story, as if anyone could have made the same mistakes she did.
So what exactly are my thoughts on Gladys: A Musical Affair? It is a good execution of a premise that I will never cease to find absolutely batshit crazy. As I was leaving, one of the theatregoers asked me if I thought Gladys: A Musical Affair was good. I responded “it was interesting”, because, genuinely, I don’t know if I thought this musical was good or bad.
Is it bad? I had fun, I clapped along, I laughed. Is it good? Barab glir, barab glir, barab glir. But I am profoundly grateful that it exists, because I never, ever want to forget the mass psychosis of the narrative surrounding Gladys Berejiklian, the woman who saved Australia.
This article doesn’t really mention COVID but it does make the batshit argument that Jacinta Allan should break free from Dan by “making tough calls on budget repairs” — i:e, scrapping his most popular infrastructure project.
the actor who played her dressed up well