Anyone interested in Tammy Faye Bakker — the chirpy televangelist queen of the ’80s — can watch a documentary and a biopic about her, both called “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” or read the autobiography “Tammy: Telling It My Way.”
There’s also plenty out there about Bakker’s bonds with gay men, which was exhibited most poignantly in 1985, when on Christian television she did what many conservatives considered unthinkable: She interviewed a gay man who had AIDS, the Rev. A. Stephen Pieters. She admonished Christians — “we who are supposed to be able to love everyone,” as she put it — for not embracing the dying.
Now the most famous daughter of International Falls, Minn. — who died of cancer in 2007 at 65 — is getting perhaps the gayest tribute a person can have: a Broadway musical.
“If you were an outcast or pariah, Tammy Faye loved you even more,” said Elton John, the composer of “Tammy Faye,” which opened Thursday at the Palace Theater in Manhattan. “That’s what happened with her and gay people.”
Through bald farce, earnest biography and a pop-country score, “Tammy Faye” details how she and her husband, Jim Bakker, started the television program “The PTL Club” in the 1970s and became highly successful televangelists, only to have a fall from grace in the late 1980s, amid sex and financial scandals, and later divorcing.
“Tammy Faye” could have used a hug after critics weighed in. In her review for The New York Times, Elisabeth Vincentelli called it “strangely bland.”
But the show has a fan in Jay Bakker, the couple’s son. In a statement he said it was “exciting to finally see my mom’s legacy celebrated” in “a joyous and thoughtful manner.” It feels, he added, “like redemption.”
For a musical about a distinctly American personality and religious tradition, “Tammy Faye” sure is British. In addition to John, the production’s other British members include the book writer James Graham, the director Rupert Goold and, in her Broadway debut, the actress Katie Brayben, who won an Olivier Award for the role when the show ran on London’s West End two years ago.
Graham said he carried “humility and curiosity” writing about American evangelicalism. But being an outsider has its dramaturgical benefits.
“You remind people on the inside how wild and crazy and huge something is,” he said. “To Americans, this is normal. It takes someone to go, no, this is strange. The world of televangelism is mad.”
Christian television and music are no mystery to Jake Shears, the Scissor Sisters frontman who’s making his Broadway debut as a lyricist. He grew up with what he called a “nonjudgmental” Southern Baptist mother, and was particularly fascinated by what happens when Christian and secular music marry, as in Elvis Presley’s gospel recordings, a “very homoerotic listen because Elvis is singing about ‘loving him’ with a capital H.”
Nowhere is that gay sensibility more evident than in the “Tammy Faye” song “He’s Inside Me,” a high-energy jamboree of gay sex suggestiveness. “There’s a lot of eroticism and double entendres in songs about God,” Shears noted.
As for the oversaturation of Tammy Faye Bakker projects, John said the musical has been 12 years in the making, “and great stories are always being told and remade, and like ‘A Star Is Born,’ they can be told and told again.”
The show tones down Bakker’s signature over-the-top makeup — her “armor,” as the singer Jim Caruso put it. In 1996, Caruso worked on “The Jim J. & Tammy Faye Show,” the short-lived daytime talkfest that Bakker hosted with the comic actor Jim J. Bullock.
“She knew who she was, what the audience wanted, and was proud of it,” Caruso said. “Her face told a story of resilience and, like all great show women, she stood firmly behind it.”
Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Dartmouth College, said that during Bakker’s heyday, evangelical leaders like Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell — all depicted as harrumphing Holy Rollers in the musical — treated her with disdain. Fallwell considered her “risible and grasping and materialistic,” Balmer said.
Her compassion for gay men was worlds away from the view of her preacher peers, who treated AIDS as divine punishment for homosexuality. What do today’s evangelical leaders think of her?
“I’d venture to say that she’s forgotten,” Balmer said. “Maybe the musical will remind them of who she was but probably not in the ways they want to be reminded.”
It remains to be seen if theatergoers will turn to “Tammy Faye” for entertainment when, as Vincentelli wrote in her review, “this show is opening at a moment when many Americans may not find political fundamentalism funny.” On the other hand, the gay dictionary has a word for a story of betrayal, sex, religious fervor and redemption: Drama.
“Is Tammy Faye a Shakespearean figure? Probably not,” Balmer said. “But there’s a tragedy and a poignancy to her life that is worthy of Broadway.”
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