Sunday Arts Magazine

8 Jun 2020

Neil Gooding Director Who’s Your Baghdaddy

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Neil Gooding Director Who’s Your Baghdaddy

During the current Covid-19 restriction, the arts community has been compelled to move their creativity online due to the inability of people to attend theatre productions. Now comes the first season of a stage musical reimagined to be performed online – WHO’S YOUR BAGDADDY (OR HOW I STARTED THE IRAQ WAR) will be performed online from 24 to 28 June for five performances only.

Presented as a support group for people who started the Iraq War, this dark, boisterous and irreverent story follows a handful of mid-level spies whose vanity and office politics contributed to the worst intelligence blunder in modern history. The Australian Premiere of this 2017 hit Off-Broadway musical will be presented by Curveball Creative and directed by Neil Gooding. It stars Blake Erickson (Shrek), Phillip Lowe (Georgy Girl), Laura Murphy (Muriel’s Wedding), Matthew Predny(Kinky Boots), Adam Rennie (The Rocky Horror Show), Katrina Retallick (Come From Away),Justin Smith (Billy Elliot) and Troy Sussman (Aladdin).

The musical is set in an “AA-style” support group meeting for people who believe (or don’t want to believe) that their actions lead to the start of the Iraq War. The story focuses on the recruitment and eventual disgrace of an Iraqi defector, codenamed “Curveball”, and the use and misuse of his testimony by the CIA, State Department and Bush Administration. In the show, as in reality, Curveball provides Western intelligence agencies with false intelligence on Iraqi mobile weapons laboratories. This intelligence, which is later discovered to have been fabricated, was used by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his 2003 speech to the UN Security Council to justify the invasion of Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein.