Elton John and Jake Shears’ Broadway musical about televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker makes an unconvincing case for her iconic status.
and lyrics by Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters fame—sees the eponymous televangelist, played by two-time Olivier Award winner Katie Brayben, interview and then hug a person with AIDS.
This is an important fabrication on the part of the musical, because the body-contact of the hug is supposed to seal Tammy Faye‘s heroism, the sign that she has an open heart and mind, and is better than the narrow-minded bigots and selfish, self-aggrandizing TV preachers she is surrounded by. The musical makes the salient point that Ronald Reagan’s rise to the presidency was powered in no small part by the religious right.
She may have been a gay icon of her time, but why feel the need to thread a fantasy moment into her canonization? Did Tammy Faye say and do more for LGBTQ people than that interview? If she did, then why not show it and make it more a consistent, grounding theme of the show? imagining God physically inside them. “God’s House/Heritage USA” also revels in the technicolor, surreal lunacy of the Bakkers constructing a Christianity-centered theme park.
Songs like “Look How Far We’ve Fallen” and Tammy Faye’s big 11 O’clock number “If You Came to See Me Cry” are offensive baloney. We haven’t come to see her cry; there is nothing about her, as presented on stage, that would merit such engagement.
Evangelicalism Ronald-Reagan Broadway Musical-Theatre
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