Broadway review by Adam Feldman
In real life, Tammy Faye Messner was a character: a televangelist whose outlandish makeup and hyperemotional exuberance at the side of her then-husband, the Pentecostal preacher Jim Bakker, made her a star and then a laughingstock in the emerging “electric church” of Christian broadcasting in the 1970s and 1980s. She poked fun at her own history as a scandal queen in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a campy 2000 documentary narrated by RuPaul (which inspired the 2021 biopic for which Jessican Chastain won an Oscar). “I’ve often thought I should probably be on Broadway,” Tammy Faye told the camera with a laugh. “All my drama!”
The new musical Tammy Faye takes her up on that musing. As portrayed by the English actress Katie Brayben, who originated the role two years ago in London, this Tammy Faye gets to be the heroine of her own story about love and acceptance, not just a sidekick who got kicked off the air (and then kicked when she was down). She gets a love-story arc with Jim, played by Christian Borle as a dorky underdog who outgrows his collar. She gets to sing several big solos with catchy 70s-tinged music by Elton John and mostly serviceable lyrics by Scissor Scissors frontman Jake Shears; she gets to wear amusingly outré outfits, designed by Katrina Lindsay. Yet she doesn’t pop as vividly as she did onscreen. She’s smaller than life.
Tammy Faye | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
Tammy Faye’s book is by the prolific British playwright James Graham, who specializes in modern-history plays like Ink. Beyond the Bakkers’ particular trials, the musical tracks a larger phenomenon: the story of how religious fundamentalists—notably the Bakkers’ nemesis, and the musical’s villain, Jerry Falwell (a suitably clammy Michael Cerveris)—laid the groundwork for political upheaval that is still being felt today. (“Together, we…can return this country to a time of greatness again,” Falwell tells California Governor Ronald Reagan. Wink wink nudge nudge know what I mean?) Rival preachers rise and fall on the fickle pedestals of Bunny Christie’s gray, boxy set; all of them are eventually enmeshed in scandals not unlike the ones that brought down the Bakkers and their PTL Television Network.
Tammy Faye | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
In the course of its decades-spanning survey, Tammy Faye Britsplains the Evangelical movement in ways that may have felt insightful in London, where the show earned many good notices. But U.S. audiences might be distracted by the dramatic liberties that Graham takes with the history; in this account, the hugely successful evangelists Paul Crouch (Nick Bailey) and Jan Crouch (Allison Guinn) seem like the Bakkers’ employees, and media mogul Ted Turner (Andy Taylor) seems to own the PTL. They may also not be taken with the show’s air of what-fools-these-Yankees-be wonder at Americans’ wacky-tacky ways, which verges at times on contempt. The notion of the electric church is introduced sincerely by the Reverend Billy Graham (Mark Evans, gleaming of voice and of pompadour), and one of the show’s most effective numbers, “Open Hands/Right Kind of Faith,” depicts how Tammy Faye’s approach connected with her viewers. But the latter song is followed immediately by a sophomorically dismissive one: “He’s Inside Me,” a collection of smutty religious double entendres—“Let him fill you whole,” “He’ll spray his love,” etc.—that might work for a drag queen’s club act but are awfully cheap jokes for such expensive seats.
Tammy Faye | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
As in both film iterations of The Eyes of Tammy Faye, the musical emphasizes Tammy Faye’s loving approach to LGBT people, including a 1985 heart-to-heart with a gay and HIV-positive pastor. The production as a whole, directed by Rupert Goold, is suffused with campiness: the scenes in which Jim and Tammy Faye perform on TV are milked for showbiz cheese; the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the President of the LDS Church, in silly hairpieces, bicker and gossip on a party line; there is a running joke about the effeminacy of the actors performing Biblical epics at the Bakkers’ massive Christian theme park, Heritage U.S.A. (“Think of it like Disneyworld,” Jim says. “But for good people.”)
The trouble with this conception is that Tammy Faye herself is almost the least garish thing about it. Brayben won an Olivier Award for this role, but there’s a fundamental Englishness about her that she can’t quite shake; she’s solid and sympathetic, and sings extremely well, but she doesn’t access Tammy’s rawness and almost childlike ebullience—the personal charisma at the center of her brand of Charismatic Christianity. And the musical doesn’t help her get there. The qualities that made Tammy Faye a gay icon—the cosmetics, the pills, the excess, the tears—are addressed only glancingly; we don’t get inside her head about them. Instead, Tammy Faye serves us a likable, sincere gal doing the best she can in a world whose machinations she doesn’t understand. But does Tammy Faye understand them any better? Its point of view is hard to discern. The eyes may be a window to the soul, as Tammy was wont to say, but it’s hard to see the soul through eyes that can’t decide if they’re glaring, winking or crying.
Tammy Faye. Palace Theatre (Broadway). Music by Elton John. Lyrics by Jake Spears. Book by James Graham. Directed by Rupert Goold. With Katie Brayben, Christian Borle, Michael Cerveris, Mark Evans, Nick Bailey, Allison Guinn, Charl Brown, Ian Lassiter, Raymond J. Lee, Max Gordon Moore, Alana Pollard, Andy Taylor. Running time: 2hrs 35mins. One intermission.
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Tammy Faye | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
