★★★✰✰
Believe it or not, The Almeida’s Tammy Faye is not the first musical based on the life of the American televangelist. It is easy to see why: the larger-than-life Christian TV host was practically a walking talking power ballad. Christian kitsch. Jesus in a jumpsuit. Previous musicals based on Tammy Faye Bakker’s life have been small scale fringe affairs. This time the big guns have been rolled in: writer James Graham whose critically acclaimed play Best of Enemies is about to launch in the West End, director Rupert Goold who has blessed the Almeida with a directorial Midas touch, Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears on lyrics, and Elton John, who needs no introduction, pens the score.
Despite the heavyweights behind the scenes Tammy Faye has an identity crisis. It presents itself with a choice: become a celebration of Tammy Faye’s work as a LGBT icon and AIDS activist, or an indictment of her avarice, hubris, and inevitable Icarian fall from grace. A choice is sadly never made, and the eyes of Tammy Faye are left myopic, not seeing beyond the glitz and glamour.
Known for his politically meaty writing, Graham brings some of the signature intrigue that has electrified his other plays. Here it’s the increasingly intimate relationship between church and state as a blueprint for modern day American Conservatism. The daddy of modern Republicanism Ronald Reagan even makes an appearance and conspicuously declares that he will “make America great again” as a gaggle of straight-laced televangelists fight for his attention.
But the promised interrogation of religion in the neo-liberal age of mass media is not given room to breathe between the tightly choreographed musical numbers. We are left with a predictable fall from grace narrative; blackmail and fraud eventually send shockwaves rippling through Tammy Faye’s television empire and soon its ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ for her.
With that said, the production is flamboyantly fluid. It fizzles with energy which strengthens infectiously charismatic performances all around. Olivier award-winning Katie Brayben as Tammy Faye is undeniably effervescent prancing around the stage in increasingly garish make up costumes and fabulous wigs. As one drole octogenarian from The Golden Girls quips: “Just because you put your makeup on with a butter knife doesn’t make you Tammy Bakker.” Brayben’s characterisation is astute and remarkably compassionate despite the heightened campiness. But without enough done to disentangle her knotty morality, the character is left literally and symbolically in purgatory. So is the audience.
She is propped up by a dynamic Andrew Rannells who has a delightfully plastic smile as Tammy Faye’s ditsy husband. There are glimpses of his inner psychodrama, a snippet of a puritanical upbringing that leaves religious guilt and latent bisexuality hanging over his adulthood. It’s enough to whet our appetite, but again not enough to satisfy.
Most surprising of all is the inaudacious music. Most of the songs evoke the Bible Belt, think guitar twangs and the icy melancholy of Johnny Cash synthesised with Dolly Parton’s buoyant optimism. It fleshes out their world, but at times it is generic and they all seem to blur into one; I didn’t come out humming any of the tunes. But that might just be me.
Words by Alexander Cohen
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