Review: Tammy Faye, a Broadway Musical About the Televangelist Turned Gay Icon

Mascaraed eyes float through pink clouds during the preshow of Tammy Faye, the new Broadway musical by Elton John (music), Jake Shears (lyrics), and James Graham (book) that played London’s West End in 2022. The eyes of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker are undoubtedly iconic, surely the stuff of a Broadway logo — like Cats. But that doesn’t guarantee a great musical, something anyone walking away from the Palace Theatre might tell you.

The first 20 minutes are promising, a VHS hiccup in the projections triggering sense memories of early cable TV.  We see Tammy Faye (Katie Brayben) in a white robe. A baritone voice calls her name. “Oh God,” she peers skyward, “is that you?” But it’s just her proctologist, and he has bad news: cancer.

The frame falls away and Tammy Faye flashes back to the tent revival where she first met Billy Graham (Mark Evans). All the big names are there: Jimmy Swaggart (Ian Lassiter), Marvin Gorman (Max Gordon Moore), Pat Robertson (Andy Taylor), and Jerry Falwell (Michael Cerveris). Naturally, Tammy Faye falls for the goofy guy with the puppets, Jim Bakker (Christian Borle).

Rev. Graham has a new message to share with them in the rollicking gospel number “It’s the Light of the World.” If church attendance is down and people are staying home to watch TV, they should meet them where they are: “We’ll sing God’s songs with the cameras on,” he preaches, launching the modern televangelist crusade like Urban II in a snappy suit.

Jim and Tammy Faye take the message to heart and convince Ted Turner (Taylor) to launch a satellite so they can preach the gospel around the globe as the PTL (Praise the Lord) Satellite Network. Tammy Faye’s flamboyant showmanship and their unorthodox guest list (everyone from Larry Flynt to Ronald Reagan) earn the Bakkers millions of viewers as their comrades in Christ (especially Falwell) look on covetously. But their spendthrift ways, Jim’s dream of building a Christian theme park, and the watchful eye of the tax man threaten to cast all they have created into the fiery pit.

Playwright Graham, who has dramatized the palace intrigue on Fleet Street and the televised rivalry that initiated the era of shouting heads, does a fine job exposing the internal fissures of the televangelist movement. He also admirably spotlights the poor people whom the Bakkers harmed with their prosperity gospel. But his exploration of what led Tammy Faye to be a joyful heretic within the otherwise dour electric church is shallower.

“A lot of people in this community made my mom an ‘outcast’ after her divorce,” she says to Jim, explaining why PTL should open its arms to all. The line does a lot of work, briefly telling us about (rather than showing us) the deep wound driving her (the 2021 film, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, does a better job in this regard). It feels like an afterthought, but Tammy Faye’s outsider status is very much central to our lasting fascination.

The songs do little to illuminate her motives, but they are pleasant enough to hear: “If Only Love” is a classic Elton John duet, and I’m still humming “It’s the Light of the World.” Shears giddily harvests the low-hanging fruit of sex puns for the number “He’s Inside Me,” which arrives as empty-calorie comic relief within Graham’s serious political drama.

Is this a quasi-Shakespearean history about cutthroat church politics? Is it the ballad Tammy Faye — as sung by the gays? Or is this a flawed yet fierce woman looking back at her life from purgatory? I suspect that if you asked the three writers, you would get three different answers.

Brayben fights her darndest to unify this trinity of visions into one coherent protagonist who might convince us to overlook the tonal dissonance. And she nearly succeeds, seducing us with her megawatt charm and selling even the mediocre songs for all they’re worth. At moments (particularly the song “Empty Hands,” which closes the first act) it really does feel like seeing the actual Tammy Faye onstage at the Palace, following the footsteps of Judy and Liza in her journey to gay canonization.

She has a generous co-star in Borle, who delivers the most restrained performance I’ve ever seen from him. Cerveris makes a convincing baddie and somehow manages to prevent this whole thing from spinning out into high camp during his number “Satellite of God” (“We patriots and soldiers / Will ride the founder’s shoulders”). He just can’t stop with the double entendres, can he?

Rupert Goold helms a typically smart production, the action taking place on set at a television station. A giant wall of screens dominates the upstage area, out of which characters appear like celebrity guests on Hollywood Squares (arresting set design by Bunny Christie). Lynne Page’s choreography captures both the era and the exhausting dance the Bakkers had to sustain to swindle so many people for so long.

As costumed by Katrina Lindsay, the cast looks like they’ve just leapt off the screen circa 1979, clad in powder blue and pastel pink. Neil Austin aggressively lights this land of smoke and mirrors, at one point blinding the audience (I suspect to distract us from the flimsy disco number “In My Prime Time”). When Finn Ross’s ambitious live video works (several times at my performance the camera seemed to focus on torsos, unintentionally decapitating the vocalists), it is impressive and really conveys the God-like power of television in the late 20th century. Nick Lidster (for Autograph) delivers pristine sound design, making every lyric sadly audible.

You won’t have a bad time at Tammy Faye, but you probably won’t walk away with a new favorite musical, either. It’s still a lovely tribute to the woman who interviewed an AIDS patient on television at a time when the Reagan administration would barely acknowledge the epidemic, and did so in front of an evangelical audience, with no fear that her sincere expression of Christian love unto the least of her brethren would result in her excommunication, and who doubtlessly helped save countless lives and family relationships because she opened the door to another way. We should all be so brave. Amen.