The Palace Theater, the venue for this disappointing British import about the rise and fall of American televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, feels like a metaphor for the musical, but in reverse. After a six-year, 80-million dollar renovation, the landmarked interior of the famed 1913 theater is impressively intricate and shiny and gold, but its exterior is surprisingly nondescript.
By outward appearances, “Tammy Faye” seemed destined to be a hit on Broadway: Generally hailed in London, it is put together by a prestigious creative team with impressive track records, including Elton John (The Lion King, Billy Elliot); it marks the Broadway debut of Katie Brayben, who won an Olivier for her much-heralded performance in the title role, and features two beloved Tony-winning Broadway stars, Christian Borle as Jim Bakker, and Michael Cerveris as the Rev. Jerry Falwell.
Yet for all its promise, “Tammy Faye” struck me as essentially hollow, without a clear reason for existing. The score sounds largely generic; the sets look deliberately chintzy; the book mistakes crudeness for cleverness.
The show begins with Tammy on a raised platform looking up into a shaft of light, as a disembodied voice calls her name.
“Oh God, is that you?” she says.
The voice answers: “This is your proctologist, we’re scanning your colon.”
This is a cheap laugh, and a heartless one. The doctor soon tells her she has colon cancer.
This is a prologue, near the end of her life; she died of cancer in 2007, at the age of 65, some two decades after the implosion of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s PTL (Praise the Lord) empire.
What are we to make of this first glimpse of the character with whom we are being asked to spend the next two and a half hours? Are they painting her as a fool? Are they questioning her faith, and ridiculing her religion? Are they establishing an ironic distance from her story, promising to entertain us at her expense? I suspect, based on the subsequent sympathy with which she is depicted, that the creative team just didn’t think this through.
After that opening scene, Tammy takes us back to the 1970s, where we see her attending a tent revival with Billy Graham, who decries the national decline in church attendance and proposes a solution. “My friends, welcome to the age of the Electric Church.” A quintet of televangelists chime in: Jimmy Swaggart, Marvin Gorman, Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell.
Certainly, there is an important context to the story of Tammy Faye, who with her husband Jim Bakker led (as we’re told in the show) “the fastest growing ministry on earth,” tapping into the then-new technology of cable and satellite television. That technology has been supplanted. What remains important is that the rise of the “Electric Church” coincided with the launch by the Evangelical Christian community into mainstream secular American politics, a decision that has had ramifications ever since, and especially now.
There are hints in the show of this nascent rise in Christian nationalism, such as a scene between Falwell and then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan
Falwell: Sir, it’s time to put God in the White House.
Reagan: Isn’t that against the Founding Father’s intentions?
Falwell: There is only One True Founding Father, Sir.
Falwell is the unmistakable villain in the piece, played with relative subtlety by the always reliable Cerveris, but his villainy is mostly because of the way he takes over the Bakker’s ministry once they become embroiled in a ruinous sex scandal (Jim’s affair with church secretary Jessica Hahn) and their financial shenanigans.
Falwell and the other preachers are primarily presented as serious men – sure, intolerant, unlike Tammy Faye, but their more important contrast seems to be their lack of cheerfulness, and their ignorance of what makes good television. The song in which they’re introduced leads to the first appearance of Jim Bakker, who leaps on stage holding up a puppet. “Hey,” he says to the puppet right afterwards, “nice job humiliating us back there.” To which the puppet replies: “What me? You’re the doofus talking to a puppet.”
This is the moment when the show would have us believe Jim and Tammy Faye meet for the first time, forming a bond that makes them millions. Act I is taken up with the ins and outs of their rise, Act II with their downfall, and her effort to become her own woman.
Much is made of Tammy Faye’s instinctive connection with people, and her compassion, especially for the gay community. The show includes a scene depicting the famous story of Tammy Faye in 1985 inviting Steve Pieters onto her show a gay Christian preacher with AIDS, although in the stage version, Tammy Faye hugs him (the creative team perhaps confusing her with Princess Diana.) Yet, the show also plays down Jim’s homosexual encounters (There are veiled threats from Falwell alluding to a previous affair with John Fletcher, of which the 2021 movie, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” is more explicit. The movie also has Jim explaining his sex with Hahn as his effort in effect to prove his heterosexuality. There is no such mention in the musical.) Far more irksome is a supposedly comic interlude in which Jim introduces a play about the Crucifixion in the theater at their Disneyland-like Heritage USA theme park, and its two queens flamboyantly flounce about as Pontius Pilate and Jesus.
“This is a holy re-enactment,” Jim sputters. “And…they’re all gay.”
“It’s musical theater,” explains John Fletcher as if the explanation is self-evident.
This odd, attempted moment of camp – at such cross-purposes to the earnest gay preacher scenes — is mercifully brief, but I think it offers a clue to why “Tammy Faye” doesn’t land. The show is apparently trying to combine affectionate satire with pointed commentary, like “The Book of Mormon” or “Hairspray.” But unlike those superior shows, the creative team doesn’t seem to understand the worlds they are trying to satirize, nor care enough to express a cogent point of view.
The failed effort at satire extends to the set and costumes, which are meant to evoke the popular goofy TV shows of the 1970s. The dominant color scheme is faded pastel colors like The Newlywed Game. The centerpiece is a wall of TV monitors, which sometimes double as Hollywood Squares, with character popping up for Laugh-In like one-liners that are rarely funny (At a couple of points, these are the President of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope.) Sometimes the monitors combine into a single dominant image – most dramatically when they show Tammy Faye singing.
And, yes, Katie Brayben can sing. She belts most of them out. Some can be moving. Here is “Empty Hands,” when Tammy Faye has just learned that Jim has had sex with Jessica Hahn
Here I am trying to stand
With faithless mercy
Empty hands
I want to forgive you but
I don’t think I can with
Faithless mercy and empty hands
Her duets with Christian Borle can be fun
If Only Love
But I’m guessing that the moment I’ll most remember about Tammy Faye in this musical is the animated image before the show starts of her blinking eyes on the curtain, her mascara running with her tears.
Tammy Faye
The Palace Theater
Update: Closing December 8
Running time: Two hours and 35 minutes, including one intermission
Tickets: $60 – $320. Digital lottery: $45. Student rush: $30.
Music by Elton John, lyrics by Jake Shears, book by James Graham
Directed by Rupert Goold, choreographed by Lynne Page
Scenic design by Bunny Christie, costume design by Katrina Lindsay, lighting design by Neil Austin, video design by Finn Ross, and sound design by Nick Lidster for Autograph.
Cast: Katie Brayben as Tammy Faye Bakker, Christian Borle as Jim Bakker, and Michael Cerveris as “Jerry Falwell”. Autumn Hurlbert, Nick Bailey, Charl Brown, Mark Evans, Allison Guinn, Ian Lassiter, Raymond J. Lee, Max Gordon Moore, Alana Pollard, and Andy Taylor, as well as Amanda Clement, Michael Di Liberto, Jonathan Duvelson, Lily Kaufmann, Denis Lambert, Elliott Mattox, Brittany Nicholas, Keven Quillon, Aveena Sawyer, Allysa Shorte, TJ Tapp, Daniel Torres, and Dana Wilton
