These reviews are largely dead-on.
This is a show that has Tammy Faye being told, "It's not hemorrhoids, it's cancer," as one of its very first lines, and that is apparently a line intended to be taken seriously, and that tells you a lot.
Tammy Faye is reduced to a small figure here, with no clear wants or even a clear arc. We're told she cries and wears a lot of mascara, we're told she connects to millions, we see almost none of it. She is treated extremely deferentially, even as she seems to have benefited from Bakker's crimes and played a large part in defrauding the faithful (and the concoction of a Lady Diana moment, giving a gay man with AIDS a hug, is a particularly galling fiction as depicted here). The musical falls into some standard bio traps, particularly a plot that seems driven less by character struggles and desires and more of a rote historical "and then this happened, this happened, this happened," particularly in the second act, even as so much is fictionalized or left unaddressed. Jim Bakker doesn't fare better- we never really get a clear sense of how a doofy Christian puppeteer with little charisma became a philanderer and white collar criminal. He just.. does.
The show's tone is a major problem, whipsawing from wink-wink camp to earnestness to the point that the opening night audience was laughing at sincere moments or not laughing at things that seemed intended to be funny. Toward the end, Tammy Faye tells a nurse the gays always had her back- punctuated with a rainbow floor and a few chords of "I Will Survive." This was, of course, a thing she said and felt- but we never see it depicted in the show, and reducing it to a pandering gag is reductive. The show doesn't really seem to have much to say about anything despite the topic being fertile ground for a lot of discussion. The most it settles on is that evangelists are hypocrites and frauds, which... yeah, this is well-worn territory dating back to Elmer Gantry. The notion of an "electric church"- televangelism- is an interesting topic to explore, and I liked that the set was both a literal and metaphorical embodiment of it, but, again, all the show does is repeat that the church can now reach into homes. I'm pretty sure an episode of Murder, She Wrote handled this topic with more depth. There are some feints at female empowerment and dealing with sexism in Christianity, but, again, so surface-level and ultimately undercut by the fact that all the writers seem to be willing to do is trot Tammy Faye out to wear a wig and suffer a bit.
Incidentally, it's Jerry Falwell who is the best rendered character here, as he actually has clear wants. And despite his villainous depiction and Tammy Faye getting a posthumous last word over him, it's Falwell who's had the last laugh in real life.
It's all superficial and glancing the surface of deep and relevant issues in American culture- but this is also a show that dilutes Tammy Faye's most famous feature, her makeup-slathered surface. So what are we doing here?
As a bad musical, it's not nearly as fun as the firing-on-all-cylinders of bad taste Diana. It's just... so middling, with occasional bouts of camp, but long stretches of meh.
"...everyone finally shut up, and the audience could enjoy the beginning of the Anatevka Pogram in peace."
Updated On: 11/15/24 at 12:08 AM
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