Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – The new musical TAMMY FAYE arrives on Broadway eager to please but provides little illumination and point of view

• By drediman
• November 18, 2024
• No Comments

Last week, the new musical Tammy Faye opened on the Great White Way at the gorgeously refurbished Palace Theatre (in the process of getting its much needed facelift, the landmark theater was lifted, astonishingly, 30 feet above street level). For those of you unfamiliar with the titular figure, she was a charismatic televangelist who rose to fame (and notoriety) with her husband Jim Bakker, also a preacher, during the excessive years of the Reagan administration. In short, the musical — which arrives on Broadway after a successful run across the pond at London’s typically reliable Almeida Theater — charts the couple’s meteoric rise, the various scandals that subsequently ensued, and their sobering fall from the heights of fame and success.

Given the title of the show, it’s no surprise that the musical spends much of the time focused on Tammy Faye — or at least tries to. The book by James Graham — which takes ample liberty with historic events — takes a broad strokes panoramic approach in adapting real events for the stage, much like his own plays Ink, Enemy of the People, and Dear England. As a result, the efficiently-plotted musical ends up somewhat deficient in intimacy and depth as it lays out its wide-reaching narrative web and attempts to draw tenuous parallels to today’s world. So as a character study, there’s little that’s particularly illuminating about the portrait it paints of Tammy Faye — even its attempts at fleshing her out as a gay icon feels forced — and the overall endeavor seems to lack a clear point of view. The best part of the musical is actually Elton John and Jake Shears’ accessible, occasionally rousing score, which injects much needed life into then proceedings. 

For the musical’s American premiere, Rupert Goold repeats his directorial duties, concocting a colorful, stylized staging — Bunny Christie’s abstract set design calls to mind the game show Hollywood Squares on crack — that bombards audiences at every turn with peppy over-eagerness (perhaps to camouflage the shapelessness of the material). As Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker, respectively, Katie Brayben (who won an Olivier Award for her performance in the London iteration of the show) and Christian Borle give valiant performances that come up shy of redeeming the show. Nevertheless, each provides moments of genuine musical theater excitement (in particular, Brayben’s anthemic Act One closer is a high point of the evening). And as rival preacher Jerry Falwell, the terrifically chameleonic Michael Cerveris is underutilized.

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TAMMY FAYE
Broadway, Musical
Palace Theatre
2 hours, 30 minutes (with one intermission)
Open run