Kill your darlings is sage advice given to writers. All that stuff you cherish but doesn’t forward the action, fit the tone of the piece or gives a minor character too much oxygen: get rid of it. Slash and burn. Show no mercy.

The Dismissal: An Extremely Serious Musical Comedy is much in need of the red pen. It’s a baggy show, over-crowded with songs as it careens between satire and over-earnestness. Clocking in at about three hours including interval, it appears to have ended four or five times before it actually does.

Andrew Cutcliffe and Justin Smith, with Matthew Whittet in The Dismissal, 2023. Photo © David Hooley

The ousting of Gough Whitlam from the prime ministership nearly 50 years ago is marvellous material. The events that led to it, the dramatis personae and what it said about Australian politics and culture are grabbed with glee by book writers Blake Erickson and Jay James-Moody (James-Moody also directs). The Khemlani loans affair? You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Erickson and James-Moody’s greatest inspiration was to assign the role of narrator to Norman Gunston, the indelible comic character who inserted himself into...