Christian Nationalism, But Make It Fun: Tammy Faye

Katie Brayben and Christian Borle in Tammy Faye: The Musical. Photo: Matthew Murphy

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t clap for Jerry Falwell.

Though I’d argue that Tammy Faye — the splashy new musical about the life of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, imported from the U.K. and engineered by a Brit-heavy team including Rupert Goold directing, James Graham on book, and none other than Elton John on music—was destined for a rocky landing whenever it ended up on these shores, this is, well, quite a moment. Sitting beneath the blingy canopy of the newly renovated Palace Theatre, listening to the likes of Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, and Marvin Gorman hit their harmonies, I started getting queasy. Yes, these men are the bad guys of the show — Tammy Faye, we are to understand, preached love where they preached hate — and, yes, much of the show is an innuendo-slinging campfest, and still: The last thing I need right now is to watch the architects of our current Christian Nationalist fascism do jazz squares. Michael Cerveris, I’m sorry: It’s not you. It’s Jerry.

I don’t think I’m alone, either. When most of Tammy Faye’s numbers reached their big finishes, the audience around me produced awkward bursts of lukewarm applause. My heart went out to the cast. They are, like any and every Broadway ensemble, working their butts off up there, but, in the words of my favorite fictional Canadian hockey player, for what? Who, especially in the middle of November 2024 in New York, is the fan base here? “Whoever you are and whatever you believe, welcome to Tammy Faye!” says the chummy opening announcement — and then Tammy’s make-up-caked eyes, projected in an enormous image on the show curtain, blink softly, their mascara runs, the pink clouds around them part, and the play begins. The blithe big-tent-ism (which also seems to be Elton’s go-to interview stance) feels pat. Clearly the production’s not all that interested in people with serious Christian-conservative leanings, unless they have a whole lot of patience for endless puns about Jesus being “inside her/him/me/you” and “the sound of the Lord, coming right in your ear.” And if you are, to quote Tammy Faye’s version of Jimmy Swaggart, a “liberal-loving Marxist,” you’re probably too heartsick to find all this much fun.

“All this” being the heady rise and tragic if foreseeable fall of our big-haired heroine, who goes from small-town Minnesota girl and bright-eyed idolizer of Billy Graham (Mark Evans) to performer of Christian puppet shows for kids with her husband, Jim (Christian Borle), to queen of PTL, Praise the Lord, the Bakkers’ televangelist network that soared to stratospheric heights before crashing and burning amid fraud and conspiracy charges in 1989. Katie Brayben, who won an Olivier for her performance as Tammy Faye in London, reprises the role here with full-throated gusto and a big exposed heart. She’s a charismatic (in multiple senses of that word) center, though even her star turns—whether nervous and ardent like “Open Hands/Right Kind of Faith” or mature and defiant as in “If You Came to See Me Cry” — aren’t enough to save Goold’s production from failing to read the room. Something similar was at work in last spring’s Patriots, another British import directed by Goold, in which playwright Peter Morgan looked at the ascent of Vladimir Putin with a kind of “isn’t this interesting” remove that felt almost flippant. “The Electric Church is a spiritually vacuous abomination, like all things American,” sniffs Tammy Faye’s cartoonish version of Robert Runcie (Ian Lassiter), Archbishop of Canterbury, dismissing the televangelist phenomenon that was sweeping the U.S. It’s a joke — and also, for all of the Southern twangs and praise the lord hoopla, there’s an ocean’s worth of distance baked into the show’s DNA. “Aren’t Americans nutty?” might sell on the West End. Right here, right now, it’s tough to swallow. (We’re simultaneously too self-centered and too anxious about the strictures of identity ever to return the favor; otherwise, a Pasek-and-Paul Margaret Thatcher musical would be on its way to London right now, waiting to get its ass handed to it.)

Tammy Faye is also trying to have it both ways. When Cerveris’s Falwell wheedles his way in with an aspiring Ronald Reagan (also played by Lassiter), he assures the candidate that together they “can return this country to a time of greatness again.” “Greatness ‘again,’” Reagan muses cannily. “That’s good.” But this stuff isn’t prophetic profundity: It’s easy dramatic points being scored off a real and ongoing catastrophe. And though Tammy Faye takes pains to set its heroine in opposition to Falwell and the rest of his loathsome posse, it still requires some pretty laborious mental handwork to unknit the Bakkers from their context. Sure, they, or at least Tammy, nominally “teach warmth and compassion” (“Kindness is never out of fashion,” they sing at their journey’s bright beginning), but they also ran a con for years, taking millions in donations from mostly impoverished viewers. “You’re talking to the wrong person,” says a rattled Tammy when the reporter Charles Shepard (also played by Evans) shows up at PTL and starts asking about the finances. “I’m not allowed in those rooms. I would like to be, believe me.” I suppose it’s true that Tammy Faye was a woman in the ’80s in a super-conservative community — she probably wasn’t making the shady high-up decisions. She wouldn’t be the one to go to jail, either (that would be Jim, serving 5 of the 45 years he was sentenced to). Is that enough to redeem her? “Love is love!” and “Girl power!” are the flags we’re meant to be waving, but can they really make it through the shitstorm fresh and untattered?

If Tammy Faye is, in its heavy-on-the-hairspray-and-dick-jokes way, making a bid for its namesake’s redemption and canonization, Goold’s antiseptic, generically contemporary-looking production isn’t helping. Bunny Christie’s set is wrapped in white curtains and backed by a towering gray wall of screens. White pedestals rise out of the floor whenever a character needs to be elevated, either in glory or shame. Despite Katrina Lindsay’s profusion of colorful ’70s and ’80s costumes, the dominant vibe is still Apple Store blankness, the predictable canvas for the digital-imagery-happy modern director. Though the nod to American Christianity’s television revolution in the 1970s makes sense—“Every congregation’s the same,” sings Billy Graham to his followers, “They’d rather sit at home / Watching TV alone / So we might as well get in on the game”—the aesthetic feels slick and high-def, not satellite-broadcast and analogue. With Sunset Boulevard just a few blocks away, Goold is also punching out of his weight class: Just like Sunset, Tammy Faye’s second act begins with live footage of its star — Brayben is doing her makeup backstage, emotionally arming herself for battle, and she’s projected on that hulking screen-wall before making her big entrance. Even if you want to throw every live-feed camera in the Hudson, there’s a million ways of doing the trick. If Jamie Lloyd is a Houdini of the form, Goold ends up looking a bit more like Gob Bluth.

“You know, throughout all of time, many a prophet was persecuted,” ponders Pope John Paul II (Andy Taylor), who pops up in Tammy Faye now and again on what appear to be illuminati group calls with Runcie and the president of the Mormons, Thomas S. Monson (Max Gordon Moore). “Those we now hail as our Saints,” says the pope enigmatically, “were far from perfect.” In the end, the most likely bet is that the show’s creators—which include Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears writing the lyrics to Elton John’s tunes—are hoping to work the gay-icon angle. The real Tammy Faye Bakker was an iconoclast among her fellow televangelists for merely not hating queer people. She notably and emotionally interviewed Steve Pieters (here played by Charl Brown), a gay pastor living with HIV/AIDS, in 1985, and she credited the gay community for her cultural semi-resuscitation after the collapse of PTL and her divorce from Jim. Those facts aren’t nothing, yet there’s also something about rolling up on Broadway right after the reelection of Donald Trump and expecting to play off decades of nauseating American history with some big yass queen energy that feels simplistic at best, condescending at worst. Tammy Faye may think it’s serving up love, light, and forgiveness — “Love is mentioned so much” in the Bible, a tearful Tammy tells us, “489 times” — but too many of its other ingredients stick in the craw.

Tammy Faye is at the Palace Theatre.