(Above: Andrew Rannells as Jim Bakker and Katie Brayben as Tammy Faye Bakker in the Almeida Theatre production of the new new Elton John musical, Tammy Faye. Photo by Marc Brenner.)
There is a beloved 1938 film titled The Baker’s Wife directed by Marcel Pagnol which was based on the novel Blue Boy by Jean Giono. In 1952, composer Frank Loesser and writer Abe Burrows, who worked together on the musicals Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, were going to adapt the film into a musical starring Bert Lahr. It didn’t happen and a decade later another attempt to launch it with Zero Mostel in the lead failed to take off. By 1976, producer David Merrick flipped his toupee over the money-making prospects of the musical and got his hands on the rights. He hired Stephen Schwartz to write the music and lyrics and Joseph Stein to pen the book. It toured America for six months with Topol and then Paul Sorvino playing the baker. Carol Demas first portrayed the wife but then Patti LuPone took over the role. It never made it to Broadway but in another November in 1989 it did open on the West End in a production directed by Trevor Nunn. It ran a couple of months. Alun Armstrong and Sharon Lee-Hill starred in the West End version. A song from the score - “Meadowlark” - has become a cabaret staple and the soaring renditions of it by Betty Buckley and LuPone are seared into my theatre nerd noggin - as is all this information in this paragraph because that American tour was stage managed by Bob Borod, one of my first mentors in New York City when I was a young actor having attended Juilliard’s Drama Division. Bob had just gotten off the tour when we met and he filled my head with LuPone lore from that production. I’ve loved her ever since.
I was thinking of all this as the new musical Tammy Faye, based on the life of Tammy Faye Bakker, was beginning to unspool before me in director Rupert Goold’s cinematically seamless production at the Almeida Theatre last night that had a cleverly purposeful tacked-on visual tackiness (set design by Bunny Christie) that the look of Ted Turner’s early attempts at satellite television had from CNN’s initial days to Jim and Tammy Faye Baker’s electronic church, which Turner also financed. It was all more bumptious than sumptuous - especially Jim and Tammy’s revival-tent-cum-variety-show The PTL Club which premiered in 1974. I’d watch it in the morning in New York City around 10 a.m when it would come on after The Stanley Siegel Show, another kind of television train wreck from which you couldn’t turn away. I’d segue from Siegel interviewing his semi-regular guest, an obviously drugged-out and bleary-eyed Truman Capote, to my feeling drugged out myself simply by watching Tammy Faye whose own eyes were bleary with tears and messed-up mascara as she blubbered on about Jesus and jewelry, a blur of commodification, which turned what appeared at first to be a comedy act into something more sinister. Yet was she sinister herself? And why was I thinking of Patti LuPone and The Bakker’s Wife as this musical began? The second question is easier to answer: My mind was wandering a bit as I was trying to come up with a title for this review and then as Tammy Faye kicked in and demanded more of my attention the only other musical actress that has affected me with the pulse-racing effect as Katie Brayben in the title role was having on me is Patti LuPone. “Her voice would match the angels in its glory,” is a lyric from “Meadowlark.” It could pertain to Brayben and LuPone and even maybe Bakker herself - but this is where the seeming sinisterness snuggles up to their angelic gifts and gives them the lower lushness of humanity, grounds them, even grinds them with a gritty grace into our cultural consciousness. Brayben won an Olivier for her portrayal of Carole King in Beautiful and played Princess Diana in both the Almedia Theatre and West End productions of King Charles III by Mike Bartlett, but I was unfamiliar with her work. Now I am one of her biggest fans. She never stoops to parody and transcends mimicry and yet captures the essence of Tammy Faye. She also does an interesting incongruous balancing act in this part that could tip over so easily into overacting: she never gilds the lily to portray a woman who spent her life and career gilding it. She is never clownish or even cloying - two things that made watching the real Tammy Faye a chore at times for me - and made me realize the chirpiness was just seasoning to tenderize the woman’s toughness. And she sings better than Tammy Faye ever dreamed of singing.
But Brayben’s brilliance in the title role couldn't be possible to the moving extent that it is if it weren't for the grounding of her performance in the contextual accompaniment of Andrew Rannells as Jim Bakker. He is giving a subtle, intelligent take on his character. Just as Jim subsumed so many of his demons, Andrew, with a devilish charm, has chosen to reveal the layers of the role with a slyness that never turns slick and which ultimately does something I didn't think was possible for such a character: he broke my heart. The scene between Tammy and Jim in prison after the couple’s fall from grace had me unexpectedly in tears. And he too sings like an angel (who has seen some things.) The arc - the religious one as well as the musical and cultural one - of first seeing Rannells in The Book of Mormon and blowing me away with his anthem "I Believe" to seeing him last evening give this wise and witty and world-weary - even at times daring - performance has been lovely to behold.
The real sinisterness in the book written by James Graham (This House, Ink, etc.) is supplied by the sanctimonious, disingenuously oleaginous Jerry Falwell portrayed with a low-key relish by Zubin Varla (I’d love to see him really play Iago). But he is simply the most sinister of the sinister sons of guns of the electronic church - to differing extents, they all sullied the term “televangelist” - who with a snide snobbiness long to snub Jim and Tammy Faye but can’t deny their television power and pull. So they plot against them to plan their fall - which was, let’s face it, too easy to do because of the couple’s actions. When Tammy meets up with Falwell in purgatory before she ascends to heaven and he goes wherever it is he’s headed, she asks him how he died after telling him she died of cancer. “Heart failure,” is what he tells her. “Oh, Jerry,” she says. “That’s not how you died. That’s how you lived.”
The score by Elton John with lyrics by Jake Shears is a glorious pastiche of rock and pop and gospel and country. I would close my eyes at times and picture Elton having the time of his life at the keyboard careening rhythmically back and forth as the music flowed from him and he banged at the keys with that signature sober combination of his: concentration and abandon. The two soaring anthems he has written for this show, “Empty Hands” and “If You Came to See Me Cry,” are more than splendid; they are inspired. Brayben’s brilliance is on full display when performing them, especially “Empty Hands” which closed the first act on the highest of emotional notes. I will never forget her performance of that song. At another point, when Tammy is awaiting her ascension into heaven’s light, she is asked what got her through such a life. She says something like, “Oh, you know what did.” Her interlocutor nods knowingly and says with certainty: “God.” “No,” she says, just as certain: “The gays.” It is these two gay men - Elton John and Jake Shears - who have so lovingly and beautifully - and at times rousingly - gotten her through the version of her life they are helping to show us all on the stage at the Almeida.
I always wanted to like and appreciate Tammy Faye Bakker more than I did. After seeing Tammy Faye, I now do. I wish it had answered my question if she herself were more sinister than she ever allowed us to know. It lets her off the hook perhaps too easily in this evening full of musical hooks fashioned so expertly by Elton, et al. But I came away feeling rather sinister myself looking for Tammy Faye Bakker’s sinister side in such a musical. She tells us at the end of the evening that the Bible is more about love than hate and more about forgiveness than revenge. I loved the show. And by its end, I forgave her, not only for her awful make-up but for all the things that made her have to make herself up, this woman who invented a version of herself before this musical’s creators ever did and costumed that self with the gilt of Christian guilt. The creators have made up a more valiant version of her than I ever envisioned. But what that version leaves us with is the aforementioned forgiveness and a lot of love - as does this show itself.