Tammy Faye review

This is the story of the rise of the electric church, and the fall of two of its most glittering prophets: Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker, the televangelist couple who preached to Americans through their TV screens while fraudulently amassing a fortune. Their God-bothering grift reached its delirious peak in the 1980s, but in a way this musical fable feels very now. You could see Tammy and Jim as part of the dubious pantheon of grand-scale larcenists with whom popular culture has recently become obsessed: Adam Neumann of WeWork, ‘fake German heiress’ Anna Delvey, Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos. And just last year, the pair got their own brilliant biopic – The Eyes of Tammy Faye, with a riveting Jessica Chastain as Tammy. 

This new musical, with a book by playwright James Graham and songs by Elton John and Jake Shears of the Scissor Sisters, is a surface-skimming romp – Evita meets Jerry Springer: The Opera, by way of RuPaul’s Drag Race. It prods rather gingerly at the surging appeal of the populist politics of the Christian right – the same mindset that demonised AIDS and HIV patients as victims of a "gay plague" was the driving force behind the horrifying overturning of Roe vs Wade this year – and confronts us, too, with our enduring fascination with such tales of garish glory, crash and burn. 

But the show, directed by Rupert Goold with a vim and stylishness that can’t quite disguise its shortage of substance, lacks Graham’s usual incisive wit and grip. Nor does it quite lean hard enough into the high-camp soap-opera aspect that might have provided more biting zing. John’s bland score – his latest in a theatrical career that includes the recent Broadway flop The Devil Wears Prada, as well as hits Billy Elliot and The Lion King – draws on gospel, rock’n’roll and boogie-woogie, but rarely comes close to divine.

On Bunny Christie’s streamlined set – a purgatorial anteroom with a wall of TV screens – we meet Katie Brayben’s Tammy, robed all in white, a sonorous voice calling to her from above. Is it God? No, it’s her proctologist, about to gaze up the American icon’s fundament and deliver the bad news: she’s got terminal cancer. But before she shimmies off into the afterlife, it’s time to look back at how she got here. We watch Jim (Andrew Rannells) and Tammy progress from their sermonising, primitive early puppet shows to their 24-hour satellite-beamed channel PTL (Praise the Lord) and, most epic folly of them all, their Christian theme park Heritage USA (at its hotel, the Bethlehem Inn, “there’s always room, but we do recommend booking ahead”). Along the way, we zip through the scandal of Jim’s sexual assault of church secretary Jessica Hahn, his gay affairs and Tammy’s pill-popping; and there are cameos from porn baron Larry Flynt, Ronald Reagan, Colonel Sanders and even the Pope.

Lurking just out of shot of the cameras as the pair bask in public adoration is their nemesis, Zubin Varla’s dark-suited preacher Jerry Falwell, who has more than a whiff of brimstone about him. But the trouble is, the devil is in the detail, and there’s not nearly enough of that. Graham laudably refuses to make Tammy simply a grotesque, and although he stops short of reinventing her as a pioneering feminist, he does give us a glimpse of the sexism she was up against. She’s repeatedly referred to, even on her own TV show, as "Mrs Jim Bakker"; and though it’s Tammy the viewers love, and Rannells’ hilariously vapid Jim obviously has feet of clay and a head full of air, he gets a bigger salary and all the decision-making power. 

We also get to see Tammy at her best – delivering her famous, groundbreaking interview with Steve Pieters (Ashley Campbell), a gay pastor with HIV, in which she called for compassion and humanity in the face of homophobic moral panic. But like everyone else here, she remains cartoonish – Graham scarcely digs beneath Tammy’s trademark fright wigs and thick mascara. Even if his point is that we never really know the celebrities whom we thoughtlessly make heroes and villains, the absence of depth leaves a vacuum at the show’s heart. And while a sly reference to “trickle-down” economics serves to remind us that we, like the Bakker faithful, are victims of a long con, the production as a whole lacks a sense of purpose.

Best, then, to enjoy it on its own superficial terms. Brayben gives a powerhouse performance in the title role, her hyper, perma-smiling religious zeal mitigated by genuine warmth, an edge of waspish wit and a roaring defiance in her stand-out, climactic number If You Came to See Me Cry. Her vocals soar, and there’s a flicker of desperation behind her manic, chirpy mannerisms that breaks through the mask in that late-arriving moment of emotional exposure, rendering it startlingly moving, while making us wish we’d been allowed to see more of it.

She and Rannells are a hugely entertaining double act, especially when leading the innuendo-laden, priapic paean to the holy spirit, He’s Inside Me. Choreographer Lynne Page raises the roof with plenty of vaudevillian razzle-dazzle and two-stepping, hands-in-the-air congregational exuberance. And the cast radiates such a galvanising energy that it might just temporarily convert even the staunchest non-believer. The result is a show that, for all its faults, leaves you on a high. Would you sell your soul for a ticket? Not a chance. But if this doesn’t take you to heaven, it shows you a good time.