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.
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| 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 47th
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.
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| 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.
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| 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).
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| 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.
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| 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!”
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| 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.
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| 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.
Palace Theatre
1564 Broadway
Closing December 8