“Tammy Faye,” the new Broadway musical about the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, kicks off with a projection of a set of eyes in close-up, mascara running down in a dramatic streak.
It’s a visually arresting reference to the real-life Bakker, whose electrifyingly made-up eyes, encased in clumped lashes, gave her a look of perpetually startled innocence. Not for nothing, there have been two films titled “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” — a documentary narrated by RuPaul in 2000 and a 2021 feature for which Jessica Chastain won an Academy Award for best actress. Together, they represent what Tammy Faye, who died in 2007, is now famous for: camp iconification and performance of the self.
But after that teasing introduction, Tammy Faye’s signature Kabuki facade barely figures in the disjointed, strangely bland musical that opened on Thursday at the newly renovated Palace Theater. It is laudable that the show’s composer, Elton John; lyricist, Jake Shears (of Scissor Sisters); book writer, James Graham; and director, Rupert Goold, tried to go behind the mask of this complicated, outsize woman, whose public persona was shaped by and for television. The problem is that they ended up making her smaller than life.
The show, which originated two years ago at the Almeida Theater in London, is a straightforward look at the rise and fall of Tammy Faye (Katie Brayben, who won an Olivier Award for her performance in the original production). The climb begins when she encounters Jim Bakker (Christian Borle, leaning hard on his comic skills) in the 1960s. The couple share a sunny vision of proselytizing Christianity, delivering their message through playful puppets rather than fiery sermons. We follow them as they take to the airwaves and pioneer the use of television to spread the gospel and raise a lot of cash. By the 1970s, they have their own satellite network, PTL, on which they host a popular program.
And then the wheels fall off the wagon, as the Bakkers are swayed by money, sex and, in Tammy Faye’s case, pills.
In the early scenes, Brayben and Borle capture the couple’s upbeat spirit, and John’s music nails the era’s soft-rock melodicism — he helped create that style’s blueprint, after all. Songs like “If Only Love,” “Open Hands/Right Kind of ‘Faith’” and “He’s Inside Me” headily channel 1970s AM radio, as if the Carpenters had written for the religious-minded troupe Up With People. (The score’s impact would be much greater if the mix made the orchestra snap. The sound design is by Nick Lidster for Autograph.)
But narratively and emotionally, “Tammy Faye” is always on shaky ground because it can’t decide if it’s a satire of televangelism and power-hungry faith salesmen, the tale of the rise of politicized religion, or the earnest feminist journey of an independent-minded woman. By trying to hit so many notes, none of them resonate.
Even Goold — who was more inspired in his 2016 Broadway musical, the visually stunning, menacingly sleek “American Psycho” — exhibits unusual restraint in his staging. He makes good use of Bunny Christie’s set, which relies on a wall of cubes that look like TV sets and can open to reveal characters, à la “Hollywood Squares” or “The Brady Bunch,” but there is a general lack of energy.
This leaves Brayben — whose clean, vibrato-less singing style is perfectly for John’s music — largely in charge of anchoring the show. It’s a task that she accomplishes more effectively in the first act than in the second, when the camp version of Tammy Faye is meant to emerge.
Oddly, the character shrinks in the spotlight as the production seems afraid to lean into what made Tammy Faye so distinctive in the 1980s. She may sing “They say I’m wearing / Too much mascara / Welcome to my brand-new era,” upon making her first solo TV appearance, but she looks barely different from before.
Not that we get any insights into what drove Tammy Faye, either, besides generic faith and even more generic Broadway-style empowerment: In the same song, “In My Prime Time,” she proclaims “I’m in my prime / I’m gonna take what’s mine.”
Tammy Faye is depicted as ecumenical and generous in brushstrokes that don’t illuminate what made her tick. What is going through her mind in 1985, for example, when she interviews a gay minister (Charl Brown) who has contracted AIDS and hugs him (the actual encounter took place via satellite)?
If the emotional charge does not detonate, neither does the toothless satire — a timidity illustrated by confabs involving Pope John Paul II (Andy Taylor), the president of the Church of Latter-day Saints (Max Gordon Moore) and the archbishop of Canterbury (Ian Lassiter). When those three spiritual leaders discuss the Bakkers, it feels as if we’re watching the heads of mafia families trying to figure out how to handle an upstart rival. But Graham does not commit to that thought-provoking angle so the scenes feel superfluous.
He is just as unconvincing with the depiction of the evangelists, led by Jerry Falwell (a plummy-voiced Michael Cerveris), who are the Bakkers’ main antagonists.
When Tammy Faye tells Jim that “we worship with everyone. Republicans and Democrats,” she stands in stark contrast to the sinister, black-clad Falwell, who promises Ronald Reagan (Lassiter), then the governor of California vying for the Republican nomination for president, that “together, we can return this country to a time of greatness again.” (Cerveris is so good as a scheming true believer that it’s a wonder he has not yet played a Sith Lord in the “Star Wars” saga.)
Falwell’s line to Reagan — who ended up using a slogan that was later adopted by Donald J. Trump — earned a smattering of uneasy laughs at the performance I attended, as did Jim Bakker asking PTL viewers to help the couple fight “forces of darkness.” It’s hard to ignore the fact that this show is opening at a moment when many Americans may not find political fundamentalism funny.
As much as Jim decried shadowy foes that included “tax inspectors, the liberal media,” the Bakkers fell prey to their own demons. Their fall sparks some effectively sardonic moments, as when Jim, zipping up his fly after his extramarital tryst with Jessica Hahn (Alana Pollard), tells her “I love my wife.”
But that is too little. Too little for a show about a woman who was a lot.
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