LEITER LOOKS AT BOOKS (38th ed.): Ken Bloom. SHOW & TELL: THE NEW BOOK OF BROADWAY ANECDOTES

 

For my review of Ken Bloom's Show & Tell: The New Book of Broadway Anecdotes please click on THEATER PIZZAZZ.

40. THE BLOOD QUILT (seen November 24, 2024)

 

Lauren E. Banks, Mirirai, Adrienne C. Moore, Susan Kelechi Watson, Crystal Dickinson. All photos: Julieta Cervantes.

Pulitzer-winning Katori Hall’s The Blood Quilt (which premiered in 2015 at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage) focuses on four cyclonic African American half-sisters, the Jernigans, their varying hues signaling that each is by a different father. In the play, the siblings gather several months after their mother’s death at the rickety family homesite on fictional Kwemera Island (Kwemera means “to withstand, to endure”), off the Georgia coast. As the winds blow and thunder crashes, these Gullah Geechee women—and one’s teen daughter—unite and disunite, their increasingly ferocious squabbles mirroring the roiling storm outside.

Adrienne C. Moore, Crystal Dickinson, Susan Kelechi Watson.

They slice fabric and sew a quilt together, much as they slice each other apart emotionally only to join again in blood-signed ties that bind. Secrets emerge in a cascading shower of increasingly acrimonious recriminations revelations, touching, among other things, on HIV, rape, and, as in so many similar plays, the contents of a will. Finally, the tempest inside and out is resolved through the power of a showery ritual.

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Cast of The Blood Quilt.

While much seems familiar from other plays, interest is sustained by Hall’s richly fashioned, lyrical language—albeit often unclear by its mingling of thick Black and Geechee dialect—and the strikingly intense acting. Director Lileana Blain-Cruz has drawn first-class work from each gifted performer, their costuming by Montana Levi Blanco helping greatly to illuminate their vividly disparate personalities.

Susan Kelechi Watson, Crystal Dickinson, Lauren E. Banks, Adrienne C. Moore.

Crystal Dickinson is the stable, head-on-her-shoulders Clementine, who lived with and cared for the Jernigan family’s late matriarch, a demanding, overwhelming woman. herself almost as much a character as those we see. Cassan, played by Susan Kelechi Watson), is the mother of the precociously wise 15-year-old Zambia (Mirirai). She could have been a nurse but chose work as an army nurse because her military husband, Chad, was always being deployed to distant warzones, forcing her, in essence, to be a single mom.

Mirirai, Adrienne C. Moore.

Adrienne C. Moore plays Gio, the oldest sibling, a profane, bitterly angry, beer-guzzling, Mississippi cop in a toxic relationship with Red, the man she’s divorcing. She’s especially nasty toward her youngest sister, the beautiful, Armani-wearing Amber (Lauren E. Banks), her $500 weave displaying her outward success as a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer. Although she’s the family’s golden girl (and Mama’s favorite)—one reason for Gio’s jealous antagonism—she, too, is in a failing relationship, with a man named Zander.

Lauren E. Banks, Susan Kelechi Watson, Mirirai.

Zambia, whose thick, ungrammatical dialect sometimes disguises comments that sound too mature for a 15-year-old, is the kind of kid who tries on identities like masks: one week a vampire, the next a Goth, then a hijab-wearing Muslim, and now a lesbian. She idolizes Amber but, for all her smarts, is too much of a slacker to match her aunt’s ambition and lifelong determination to succeed. Still, beginning as a complete innocent to the world of quilting, allowing her to serve as a receptacle for cultural exposition, she ultimately proves a worthy successor to a family tradition in danger of vanishing. 

When such plays have plots involving wills, lawyers are rarely far behind. Despite her lack of familiarity with legal issues outside of her specialty, Amber can cut through knots brought up by the will’s disposal of the quilts and the family's financial decline--a huge amount in unpaid taxes—that now face the siblings. The future of the quilts, which have significant financial value, triggers violent disagreements rooted in the family’s fabled historical commitment to their making and possession. Family quilt-making, a craft in which Amber is the least proficient but for which Zambia shows a surprising knack, is the lifeblood, the spiritual sustenance of the Jernigans.

 

Crystal Dickinson, Susan Kelechi Watson. 

Hall combines naturalism with folktale qualities, using the craft of quilting to evoke feelings of mysticism, ritualism, and symbolism that artfully perpetuate the family’s spiritual history.  Several beautiful, borrowed quilts are carefully woven into Adam Rigg’s attractive set design—with its watery frontage—on the Mitzi E. Newhouse stage, including their placement on the house’s upper story where they hang over a balcony railing. Jiyoun Chang creates lovely lighting effects that help us focus on them, and Jeannette Oi-Suk Yew’s projections add an other-worldly dimension to the atmosphere. 

The Blood Quilt, unfortunately, at two and three-quarter hours, is vastly overlong. It seems intent on making sure each sister gets as much acting time as the others, especially when it becomes someone’s turn to reveal some crisis they’re experiencing or to expose a secret, including some that don’t shine nicely on Mama. 

The fierceness and frequency of people blowing their tops makes a mockery of family unity, such that one wonders why, if their mother’s death can trigger such sibling anger, what were things like at previous get-togethers? Each time the group quiets down, something else comes along to detonate emotional fireworks. For all the terrific acting this precipitates, it’s not the post-ritual peace and feeling of reconciliation with which you leave the theatre, but the ringing force of all that shouting.

 

The Blood Quilt

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse

150 W. 65^th Street, NYC

Through December 29

39. DEATH BECOMES HER (seen November 23, 2024)

 

On November 21, the Broadway musical version of the 1992 movie Death Becomes Her opened, followed a day later by the movie version of the 2003 Broadway musical Wicked, both to widespread (if not universal) acclaim. Wicked and Death Becomes Her are classics of the female frenemy genre, described by Jennifer Weiner in a Sunday New York Times op-ed of November 24, “‘Wicked’ and the Glory of Frenemies”

 

Megan Hilty and company. Photos: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.

However, while Weiner lists several other frenemy-themed movies, like Legally Blonde, Clueless, and so forth, she never mentions Death Becomes Her, which surely fits her description of works whose endings are secondary to their journeys: “The main characters draw each other out and learn from each other not in order to achieve the cliché of happily ever after but for the experience of friendship in its own right.” (Incidentally, Robert Zemeckis’s Death Becomes Her, despite its cult status—especially in the gay community—has never been considered a first-class film. It rates, in fact, only a squashed green tomato score of 57% on Rotten Tomatoes.)

 

Megan Hilty, Jennifer Simard, Josh Lamon, Christopher Sieber.

She adds, “The stories are powered by the shifting dynamics between love and hate, gratitude and resentment, and admiration and contempt, and that’s what makes them so resonant.” These and other insights are as applicable to Wicked as to Death Becomes Her, whose Broadway incarnation, bubbling with both the joie de vivre and the joie de mort.

 

It presents the sensational Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard in the farcically overcharged roles of, respectively, ultra-vain stage and screen diva Madeline Ashton, and the initially plain-Jane novelist Helen Sharp, played on film by Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn at the peak of their lissome appeal. Like them, Hilty and Simard excel as satirical avatars of narcissistic women afraid of losing their looks as they creep ever more closely to the grave.

 

Megan Hilty, Jennifer Simard, Christopher Sieber.

In the works since 2017, when a different cast (including Kristin Chenowith) and creative team were involved, the show comes to Broadway following a successful Chicago tryout earlier this year. Naturally, its book, by Marco Pennette, takes some liberties—both legitimate and questionable—with Martin Donovan and David Koepp’s screenplay, although sticking to its essential plot. Its music and lyrics, by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey, is persistently upbeat, preferring laughter to sentiment.  

 

Christopher Sieber.

Madeline, starring in a Broadway musical, is visited backstage by her old friend, Helen, accompanied by her fiancée, plastic surgeon Dr, Ernest Menville, played by the excellent Christpher Sieber in the straight-man role that even Bruce Willis had a hard time making funny in the movie. The possessively selfish Madeline steals Ernest for herself, not least because of his ability to help preserve her looks.

 

Jennifer Simard, Christopher Siebert.

Years go by and Helen, so obsessed with Madeline’s betrayal that she’s institutionalized, snaps out of it when her counselor says she must “eliminate [Madeline] once and for all.” (In the movie, Helen’s depression leads her to pig out over seven years and—before she trims off the pounds—become as bloated as Jiminy Glick. The show, with stars lacking the sleekness of the originals, cancels any suggestions of weight-related humor.)

 

Jennifer Simard, Megan Hilty, Christopher Siebert.

Helen, now glammed up, and the author of a hit book, arrives in Hollywood to take her revenge on Madeline, who—though her career hasn’t gone beyond a sci-fantasy called Dogstronaut—lives in a fabulous mansion, grand staircase included, with Ernest. Their income seems derived from his plastic surgery practice, not reconstructive mortician, as in the film. The women’s enmity climaxes with Madeline, pushed, tumbling down that winding staircase, albeit via a plot device different from that on screen.

 

Megan Hilty, Jennifer Simard.

However, because she drank from a magical potion for both rejuvenation and eternal life, provided at great expense by a flamboyant Hollywood sorceress, Viola Van Horn (Michelle Williams of Destiny’s Child)—called in the movie Lisle von Ruhman and played by a more than half-naked Isabella Rossellini—not only is she not dead, her head—for the moment, at any rate—is facing backward. Soon, Helen becomes Madeline’s shooting target, the result being a huge hole where her stomach used to be. The hapless Ernest nearly goes nuts trying to cover up the women’s deaths and physical deterioration, while they decide to live on, using his skills used to disguise the condition of their already deteriorating bodies.

 

Michelle Williams.

These and similar moments of grand guignol comic horror are among the movie’s most well-loved contributions, the CGI effects used to produce them having won an Academy Award. Unfortunately, much as Tim Clothier’s “illusions”—which includes the obvious use of doubles—are clever, they can’t help but seem cheesy (and insufficient) compared with what’s on screen. Since the quality of the special effects are so integral to the movie, some might believe the lack of anything short of equaling or bettering them should have been enough to short circuit the production.

 

Michelle Williams, Megan Hilty.

In fact, one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, its conclusion, has been radically altered, not for the better. In the original, 37 years after the main events, the women leave Ernest’s funeral, fall down some stairs, and break into pieces. A close-up shows their severed heads lying on the ground, their grotesquely painted faces rotting, chatting with casual insouciance, their friendship alive even when there’s practically nothing left of them. In the show, the scene is 50 years later, Ernest is still alive, and what we see of the women’s fate is both a dramatic and theatrical copout.

 

Taurean Everett and company.

As a show, Death Becomes Her gives audiences over two and a half hours of campy, fast-paced, tongue-in-cheek musical action, directed by Christopher Gattelli (who also choreographed) to not let a minute pass without trying for a laugh, at least when Simard and Hilty are onstage. This often leads to wink-wink mugging and line readings, saved from seeming self-indulgent by the performer’s ineffable charm and obvious awareness of the dialogue and situations’ extremes.

 

The film itself is so over-the-top that much of the enjoyment it provides comes from witnessing how hard Streep, Hawn, Willis, and Rossellini work to play broadly while remaining (relatively) believable human beings. Too often, though, the already exaggerated material is further exaggerated when done live, nuance be damned. Which isn’t to deny that many audience members respond with perpetual whooping and shouts of laughter.

 

Company of Death Becomes Her.

While none of the individual songs seem destined to be standards, they’re all pleasantly listenable and their lyrics can be amusing. One number, for example, that gets a rousing reception is “For the Gaze,” sung by Hilty in a deliberately old-fashioned Broadway-style number spiffed up by chorus boys, where the words say that everything the singer does to look beautiful is “for the gaze,” which, of course, is meant to sound like “for the gays,” receiving, in turn, roof-shaking approval from a significant segment of the audience. Sieber’s two numbers include a clever patter song, “The Plan,” sung as the items in his workshop suddenly become animated. Michelle Williams’s singing, as in “If You Want Perfection,” is as magnificent as her glittery appearance, but she doesn’t get the comic acting opportunities granted Isabella Rossellini in the film.

 

The 11 o’clock number, “Alive Forever,” shared by Hilty and Simard, is another roof shaker, as they launch vocal rockets. Madeline’s lyrics, as per Weiner’s thesis, insists that Helen, her longtime frenemy, actually likes her, and vice versa, with Helen agreeing to forgive and forget. It’s about as close to human warmth as the show ever gets, even as the stars vie to outdo each other with their musical pyrotechnics.

 

At a reported cost of $31.5 million, Death Becomes Her provides lots of traditional Broadway spectacle, with often elaborately glitzy costumes by Paul Tazewell, including an array of black and flesh-colored tights for the androgynous chorus of “Immortals” that surrounds Viola Van Horn. (No use searching for the movie’s Jim Morrison, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, or Elvis Presley lookalikes, though). Charles LaPointe’s fantastic wigs are another visual delight, as are the flashy scenic backgrounds designed by Derek McLane, excitingly lit by Justin Townsend.

 

Does the show improve on the movie, or is the movie superior? In some ways, each is better than the other. On the other hand, though, each is far from perfect; then again, what isn’t?

 

Death Becomes Her

Lunt-Fontanne Theatre

205 W. 46^th Street, NYC

Open run

LEITER LOOKS AT BOOKS (37th ed.): Richard Nelson. A DIARY OF WAR & THEATRE: MAKING THEATRE IN KYIV, SPRING 2024

For my review of Richard Nelson's A Diary of Love and War please click on THEATER PIZZAZZ.

 

38. ELF (seen November 21, 2024)

Two and a half hours is kind of long for a glorified children’s show, even one with a few adult words and innuendoes. However, the Marquis Theatre’s revival of Elf, the spirited musical comedy adaptation of the 2003 Christmas movie of that name, which starred Will Ferrell, whizzes by as fast as Santa in his supercharged sleigh on Christmas Eve. Partly, it’s because of the glowingly hilarious presence of the multitalented Grey Henson in the title role, and partly it’s because of the persistent joyfulness of the show itself, spreading holiday cheer about like the snow storm that blankets the auditorium at the end.

Sean Astin. All photos: Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade.

Elf, which premiered on Broadway in 2010, and returned for the Christmas season of 2012, has also had several London productions, in addition to lots of touring. The current revival recreates the West End staging of 2015, as sparklingly directed by Philip Wm. McKinley and vigorously choreographed b Liam Steel. Perfectly cast, and performed with overflowing charm and good humor, it will not only make you laugh, clap, and tap but may also bring tears of sentimental happiness to your eyes (as it did to mine).

 

Grey Henson.

Elf, in case you’ve never seen the movie, is the story of Buddy Hobbs (Henson), an orphan accidentally taken to the North Pole by Santa Claus when, after the baby’s unwed mother died, he crawled into Santa’s toy sack. Raised among Santa’s helper elves, Buddy grows up to tower over them, but only as a 30-year-old does he overhear that he’s not an elf but human. He also learns that his father, Walter Hobbs (Michael Hayden), is a publishing executive working for a company in the Empire State Building.

 

Grey Henson, Sean Astin.

With the blessing of Santa (Sean Astin), who periodically shows up in an easy chair to narrate the tale from a huge book, Buddy travels by foot to New York, finds his grumpy father (on Santa’s “naughty” list because he doesn’t believe in Santa), charms everyone he meets, wins the affection and support of Walter’s wife, Emily (Ashely Brown), and his pre-teen stepbrother, Michael (Kai Edgar), and has an ultimately successful romance with Jovie (Kayla Davion), a pretty fellow worker in Macy’s toy department, where he gets a job as a Christmas elf.

 

Grey Henson, Kayla Davion, and company.

His biggest task is to win his reluctant, hardheaded father’s acceptance, and to convince him that Santa does exist. Of course, these missions are successfully accomplished, especially after Santa’s sleigh is forced to land in Central Park when New York City’s lack of Christmas spirit diminishes its power. But Buddy steps in, of course, in a scene reminding me of Peter Pan when Peter, to save Tinker Bell, asks the audience if they believe in fairies. Buddy never does ask us if we believe in Santa, but the thought is there as he convinces the city to sing out with Christmas cheer.

 

Jennifer Sanchez, Sean Astin, Grey Henson, Michael Hayden, Ashley Brown, and company.

Santa, his nonelectric sleigh now charged by the holiday spirit, takes off successfully (no reindeer, by the way, because of PETA’s objections), and, in a memorably spectacular Broadway moment, flies out over the Marquis orchestra as a veritable blizzard spreads tiny flakes on one and all.

 

Kalen Allen, Grey Henson, and company.

Elf is a traditional feel-good show, with cartoon characters acted, sung, and danced with enough conviction to suspend your disbelief, and with a consistently clever book by Thomas Meehan and Bob Martin filled with funny lines, some of them just this side of naughtiness (there are several references, for example, to going to bed with someone). Although you may not walk out singing any song in particular, there’s not one among the 13 by Matthew Sklar (music) and Chad Beguelin (lyrics) that isn’t worth a listen, from “Happy All the Time,” to “Never Fall in Love (With an Elf).”

 

Grey Henson and company.

A buoyant spirit keeps the show bubbling, even during scenes when characters are angry or frustrated, largely because of the optimistic, happy-go-lucky naivete of Buddy the elf, played with adorable panache by the irrepressible Grey Henson. He captures Buddy’s farcical innocence, nails his more poignant moments, and displays considerable chops as a song and dance man.  

 

Kai Edgar, Grey Henson.

Michael Hayden is on the mark as Walter, Buddy’s perpetually irritated dad; Ashley Brown brings great warmth and a top-notch voice to Emily; Sean Astin scores smartly as both Santa and Walter’s obnoxious boss; Jennifer Sánchez makes a feisty but warmhearted Latina secretary; Kai Edgar is another of those preternaturally talented Broadway kids; Kayla Davion is a perfect love interest for Buddy, and Kalen Allen stands out as both a hot dog vendor and, especially, a snake-hipped Macy’s store manager.

 

Michael Hayden, Ashley Brown, Kai Edgar, Grey Henson, Kayla Davion.

Video projections by Ian William Galloway and Mesmer Studios, many of them moving, are a major element of Tim Goodchild’s scene design, with its many flying and sliding units, while Patricia Woodroffe’s lighting makes a potent contribution to the holiday ebullience. Goodchild’s cheery costumes are terrific, including those that make the elves, played by full-sized actors on their knees, look to be around three feet tall, and Sam Cox’s wig and hair designs add considerably to the fun.

 

Company of Elf.

Elf will be here only for a limited seasonal engagement. If you want Santa’s sleigh to take off this year, you might want to add some fuel to the Christmas spirit by visiting the Marquis Theatre to see Elf before it flies away for good.

 

Elf

Marquis Theatre

210 W. 46^th Street, NYC

Through January 4

37. BABE (seen November 16, 2024)

 

Marisa Tomei, nearing 60, retains much of the same intelligently feisty girlishness that blasted her to stardom in 1992’s My Cousin Vinny, making her an appealing draw no matter in what she appears. Her latest New York stage venture isn’t on Broadway, though, where she’s done five plays, but Off Broadway at the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre. Here, The New Group, celebrating its 30^th anniversary, is offering Jessica Goldberg’s Babe, a wobbly, behind-the-record-label drama about the music industry, originally done by the Echo Theatre Company, Los Angeles.

 

Arliss Howard, Gracie McGraw. All photos: Monique Carboni.

Tomei plays Abby (Abigail), a middle-aged executive who works in the A&R (Artists and Repertoire) division of an unnamed record company. Her dominating, macho boss, for whom she’s worked for 32 years, is the hugely successful Gus (Arliss Howard), in his 60s. A misogynistic, profane martinet who speaks to his female subordinates in rude bro language (his sensitivity sessions be damned!), Gus cares (if not romantically) for Abby; however, he barely gives her credit for her invaluable contributions to their mutual success at finding talent with whom to create grunge and punk hits. 

 

Arliss Howard, Marisa Tomei.

A third character is Katherine (Gracie McGraw), a ruthlessly ambitious new employee anxious to make her mark but whose suggestions meet with bitingly coarse rejections by Gus, whose tastes Katherine considers outdated. A fourth person is Kat Wonder (also played by McGraw), a deceased, self-destructive, punk rocker, discovered by Abby in the 1990s, whose fame stemmed from her take-no-prisoners brand of musical nihilism. Kat appears when Katherine morphs into her in Abby’s memory. These vaguely presented transformations serve more to fog than clarify the narrative.

 

Gracie McGraw, Arliss Howard, Marisa Tomei.

The play, whose occasional time shifting is equally confusing, explores the working relationships of the three prime characters, beginning with Katherine’s uncomfortable interview by Gus for a job in A&R. It’s an encounter that reveals Katherine’s #metoo touchiness about Gus’s defiantly non-apologetic, politically incorrect personality, including his calling women “girls,” or the word that presumably inspired the title, “babe.” The playwright might have done more with this issue, but she has too many other things that need attending to. We get lots of impassionedly pompous blah-blah-blah about what Gus is seeking in potential recording artists. And, if we’re checking off clichés, we can include Goldberg’s preoccupations with potential lesbianism in Abby and Katherine’s personal connection.

 

Marisa Tomei, Gracie McGraw.

This is the kind of play about artistic production where it’s necessary to reveal some semblance of the art with which the characters are dealing. Usually, the result, depicted in words or images, assumes an ersatz quality we’re forced to overlook. Here, for example, we’re asked to accept the characters’ opinions on things like the quality of song lyrics, as when Gus and Abby reject a pairing like “drowning” and “frowning” but swoon over replacing it with “drowning” and “fucking.” Not precisely Sondheim-esque.

 

Arliss Howard, Gracie McGraw.

It takes some time during the 85-minute, intermission-less play, directed with a minimum of dramatic impact by Scott Elliott, before its chief issue emerges. This happens when Katherine, whose Gen-Z disgust with the toxic, sexist environment Gus represents, makes a full-frontal attack on him reflective of the slash and burn ferocity of Kat Wonder. And, if we’re looking for another dramaturgic box to check off, we need only look at Abby, whose own suppressed ambitions for industry recognition have become apparent. She suffers not only the indignity of being professionally ignored but the curse of breast cancer, a tired device seemingly present to underline her worries about the loss of her womanly assets. We thus have yet another play requiring hospital scenes, here indicated simply by having Abby slouch in a leather, living room chair listening to music through headphones worn over a wool cap. (A few moments pass before you realize the scene has moved to a hospital.)

 

Marisa Tomei, Gracie McGraw.

Derek McLane’s set shows what’s supposed to be a sharp difference between Gus’s ostentatious apartment and Abby’s nice but less extravagant one. But both rooms use exactly the same furniture, only their rear walls being different. Gus’s is filled with industry awards, Abby’s with countless LP albums, both lit at moody, low intensity by Cha See. Jeff Mashie’s costumes, which, boringly, never change, capably identify their wearers, although a sharper distinction would be helpful for distinguishing between Katherine and Kat. 

The actors do their best to shore up the play’s rocky structure, but their characters are not very likable and their performances remain this side of memorable. Under Elliott’s direction, the temperature rises a bit whenever the characters shout at each other, a regular occurrence. For the most part, though, the emotional heat fluttering across the footlights is rarely more than tepid.

 

It’s a pleasure to see Marisa Tomei on stage (her mom was my college classmate), but I hope she chooses something more affecting her next time out.

 

Babe

Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre/Pershing Square Signature Center

480 W. 42^nd Street, NYC

Through December 22

 

 

 

 

36. TAMMY FAYE (seen November 17, 2024)

 

 

Even if not technically a jukebox musical, Tammy Faye, which opened on Broadway last week, often seems like one. This is the show that, after its London premiere in late 2022, was chosen to open the newly renovated Palace Theatre (retained within a new hotel structure); most of its British creative team, including director Rupert Goold and title role star Katie Brayben, are still in place. Playing Tammy Faye’s husband, Jim Bakker, however, Broadway veteran Christian Borle replaces Andrew Rannells, forced to step down because of contractual issues. 

Mark Evans and company. All photos: Matthew Murphy.

In a remarkable engineering feat, the interior of the Palace, vaudeville’s storied, onetime mecca, has been raised 30 feet, otherwise remaining much the same. Its peripheral features—marquee (moved a bit down 47^th Street from Broadway), entranceway (escalators added), lobby, and bathrooms—have been attractively modernized. The new features bear no architectural resemblance whatsoever to the auditorium’s traditional, now off-white, décor. Despite the bathrooms being spiffily up-to-date, their capacity still breeds endless lines, while the orchestra’s closely packed seats remain knee crunchers.

 

Katie Brayben, Christian Borle. All photos: Matthew Murphy.

The show itself, for all its newness, has similarly old-fashioned features, like its resemblance to a jukebox musical. Tammy Faye, unsurprisingly, is a biographical account of Tammy Faye Bakker (Kate Brayben), the late televangelist, whose life was also the subject of The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a major 2021 film that snared the Oscar for Jessica Chastain. Tammy, of course, was as famous for her heavily made-up eyes—which must have helped keep the mascara industry in the black—as for the extremely successful cable TV ministry she and her minister husband, Jim Bakker, created, ruled over, and earned a fortune from before it all came tumbling down in scandal, shame, and prison.

 

Katie Brayben, Christian Borle.

Just as numerous jukebox musicals, like the recently-opened A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical, typically shove decades of a musical celebrity’s life into a show running a couple of hours long, so does the two and a half-hour Tammy Faye, book by James Graham, cover the high- and lowlights of its heroine’s densely crammed biography. However, while the score in conventional biographical jukebox shows is typically associated with the person being dramatized, the one for Tammy Faye is original, with its music by pop icon and Broadway composer Elton John (The Lion King, Billy Elliot, Aida), and lyrics by Jake Shears (lead singer of the Scissor Sisters band).

 

Katie Brayben.

Ironically, as any number of YouTube clips remind us, Tammy Faye was herself an accomplished recording artist of Christian pop, although it’s doubtful a Broadway audience potentially paying over $300 apiece for premium seats would want to sit through a playlist of “Don’t Give Up, You’re on the Brink of a Miracle,” “He’s Done It Before, He Can Do It Again,” or “The Sun Will Shine Again.” On the other hand, for their target audience, such numbers are not that far behind a less-than-prime Elton John score that, given the show’s subject, includes an abundance of lively songs with spiritually uplifting messages. I can even imagine Tammy herself singing some of them.

 

Christian Borle, Katie Brayben, and company.

Tammy Faye’s narrative is bookended by the eponymous heroine’s examination by a gay proctologist (Max Gordon Moore) who finds she’s mortally ill with cancer. Thus, as so often in such shows, Tammy’s personal life and career come to us via one long flashback. In what’s probably the show’s funniest bit, Tammy tells the homosexual proctologist she chose him because, given the lack of females in the field, and her innate prudishness, she felt, “Gosh darn it, Tammy, that’s as close as you’re gonna get!”

 

Michael Cerveris (foreground), Christian Borle, Katie Brayben (rear).

The joke also sets us up to appreciate that, despite the ultraconservatism of the evangelical movement that defined much of her life, Tammy was unusually liberal in her relationship to the LGBT community, which supported her in turn. This was true especially after she shocked the movement’s leaders by showing compassion for victims of AIDS.

 

Katie Brayben.

Regardless of the excesses for which she and Jim were accused, the show treats her with great affection and respect, demonstrating why, with her bigger- than-life personality, she became so popular not only with her co-religionists, but even with the population at large, who grew familiar with her via her appearances on mainstream talk shows.

 

Still, Tammy Faye covers so much territory that its point of view is often shaky, ranging from clownish satire to sentimental mush, from political assault to religious takedown, from blissful matrimony to marital destruction, from top-of-the-world riches to three years in jail (for Jim). (Oddly, the book never mentions Tammy’s post-Bakker marriage to Roe Messner.)

 

The cast of characters includes such born-again leaders as Billy Graham (Mark Evans), Jimmy Swaggart (Ian Lassiter), Jerry Falwell (Michael Cerveris), Oral Roberts (Daniel Torres), Marvin Gorman (Max Gordon Moore), and others. These head the so-called Electric Church, which rakes in huge profits through televised sermons reaching millions of believers.  

 

Tammy meets and marries the traveling preacher Jim Bakker, whose controversial preaching attracts congregants by using puppets. In the early days of cable TV, they convince Ted Turner (Andy Taylor) to establish a satellite TV network called PTL (Praise the Lord), where their upbeat, entertaining, and provocatively informative ministry—even erectile dysfunction can be talked about—dominates the field. Tammy’s colorfully flamboyant look and buoyant personality captures wide attention. This stirs resentment from their more downbeat competitors, especially the power-hungry Falwell.

 

Trouble in paradise erupts as the Bakkers’ self-inflicted problems pile up, including Jim’s flimflam money raising, the couple’s over-the-top lifestyle, their shadily financed housing project cum theme park called Heritage USA, Jim’s notorious sex scandal with church secretary Jessica Hahn (Alana Pollard), and nasty criticism of Tammy’s hugging a grateful AIDS victim on her TV talk show.

 

Falwell, who seeks political power by putting “God in the White House,” proves a potent adversary, and the house that Tammy and Jim built cannot resist the tides rising against it. Falwell’s conservative views are seconded by a variety of peripheral historical figures, including tongue-in-cheek portrayals of Ronald Reagan (Ian Lassiter), the Archbishop of Canterbury (also Lassiter), Pope John Paul II (Andy Taylor), and others. Such persons often pop up in one of the over 40 TV-like boxes that comprise the upstage wall (set design by Bunny Christie), everything lit (by Neil Austin) and painted to suggest the kind of pastels familiar from 1970s-style TV.  

 

Katrina Lindsay’s vivid costumes capture the period feeling, Tammy’s in particular; she gets one special outfit that allows for a startling, before-your-eyes transformation. Of equal value are the wigs and hair styles created by Luc Verschueren for Campbell Young Associates. If you’re familiar with Tammy Faye’s big hair styling, you’ll appreciate what he’s done to recreate it.

 

The two dozen talented performers sing and dance to the forgettable choreography of Lynne Page, with many playing two or more roles. Two-time Olivier Award winner Katie Brayben makes a notable Broadway debut, but it’s all she can do to keep the show alive. She gets a classic 11 o’clock number, “If You Came to See Me Cry,” and almost rivals Nicole Scherzinger’s Sunset Blvd. blastoff histrionics to put it over. 

 

Unhappily, it’s all for naught as news came in a little while ago that Tammy Faye (which my adult daughter greatly loved!) is closing December 8. (Numerous empty seats were apparent when I went this past Sunday,) Folks, in all honesty, Tammy Faye, for all its flaws, is more mediocre than bad; many far worse shows have survived much longer. It deserves to have stuck around for a while, if only because more theatregoers should see Katie Brayben’s outstanding performance. But Broadway is a cruel taskmaster, and few shows can outlast the deluge of Debbie Downer reviews this one received. I suspect some may be thinking the election played a role in its rejection, what with its story about the power wielded by the kind of zealots many believe contributed to the results.

 

At any rate, Christian Borle, one of Broadway’s most versatile actor-singer-dancers, never clicks as Jim Bakker, especially if you recall the man himself, played in the movie by Andrew Garfield. Try as he may, he lacks Bakker’s boyish, almost impish quality, which one can easily imagine being present in Andrew Rannell’s London performance.  Michael Cerveris, unrecognizable as Jerry Falwell, is quite good as the repellant preacher, but, for many, Falwell’s presence leaves a bad taste.

Tammy Faye ends with Tammy Faye’s death, as we watch her depart Purgatory for heaven in a theatrical epiphany. It’s sad that the show itself must remain in Purgatory for another two and a half weeks before it moves to its own next destination. Caine’s Warehouse, I guess, as they used to say.

 

Tammy Faye

Palace Theatre

1564 Broadway

Closing December 8