The central scene in the Broadway musical Tammy Faye (Palace Theatre, booking to March 30, 2025)—with music by Elton John 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.
Their hug is, no pun intended, the clincher moment—and yet the musical is showing a lie cloaked in partial truth. The interview happened, the hug never did—and the embrace is sold hard to the audience to ennoble the character of Tammy Faye (then Bakker, later Messner).
Tammy Faye’s now-famous interview with gay pastor Steve Pieters did indeed take place in 1985 on her and her husband Jim Bakker’s Praise the Lord (PTL) network.
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It was a rightly applauded moment of television; this was an era of intense bigotry and misapprehension around HIV and AIDS—both in terms of the virus’ transmission, and the people who were suffering and dying against a backdrop of rampant prejudice, virulent homophobia (much whipped up by religious leaders), and governmental indifference.
Tammy Faye’s sympathetic interview, which also encapsulated Steve’s experience of coming out and many other aspects of his life, was in direct contravention of the general anti-LGBTQ hostility of other evangelical figures and icons, like the Rev. Jerry Falwell—the chief villain of the musical played by Michael Cerveris (with his best carved-in-granite sneer).
But, as impressive and groundbreaking as it was, the interview in reality was conducted not in person, but by satellite link. There was no hug. Pieters (who died in 2023), never physically met Tammy Faye (who died in 2007).
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.
A couple of years later, when Princess Diana touched people with AIDS in hospice visits in London, it was both symbolic and demonstrative—it showed HIV and AIDS could not be passed by touch. It also showed the power of touch and connection, and of acceptance triumphing over fear.
The musical’s audience applauds Tammy Faye’s similarly narratively weighted embrace of Steve, even if—knowing they are watching the story rooted in real life—they may be unaware that they are applauding a moment of fiction.
It’s important to note the invention as it is returned to later in the show; at a key, funny moment when Tammy is asked what has helped her survive she answers “The gays,” with the stage backdrop suddenly suffused by a rainbow.
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? (Watch the whole interview—it’s better in totality than the glancing treatment the musical affords it.)
The structure and messaging of the musical is a puzzle. At moments, it wants to be as gleefully salacious and irreverent as The Book of Mormon with songs like “He’s Inside Me” featuring Brayben and Christian Borle (Jim; both excellent of voice) 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. Here, the musical briefly, and successfully, revels in how excessive their subject matter is.
The rest of the songs—shockingly, given the musical bona fides of their creators—are earnest, forgettable duds, with a story surrounding the Bakkers that becomes more and more ill-fitting as the performance progresses.
Instead of interrogating the murky moral universe of televangelism, Tammy Faye advances the idea that because Tammy Faye and Jim seemed a little nicer and down-to-earth than the judgmental fire and brimstone of Falwell and Co., then their mission was in some way more honest and true. But it wasn’t. As the musical makes clear, Jim was prosecuted for financial mis-dealings, as well as being enmeshed in a cheating scandal. (Very late in the show, he breaks down as Tammy gently confronts him about being attracted to men.)
The musical never locates the charm of Tammy beyond her scatty outlandishness, and also does not take her seriously as an adult at the apex of a massive media empire. It never asks about her own complicity with her husband. She does not admit fault or moral or any other kind of failing. She is simply allowed to play the victim.
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.
She and her husband appear, even within the candy-coated confines of Tammy Faye, to be shallow, venal, greedy, and unsympathetic—and it is baffling any piece of art analyzing them would be quite so soft in its treatment as Tammy Faye. At moments of crisis when Tammy Faye should sharpen (when Tammy Faye faces adultery, or cancer), its tone becomes more uneven and storytelling unfocused—even if Brayben delivers her character’s zingers smartly.
Instead, the musical shrugs the mantle of gay rights icon on to its title character as a shield of armor. It isn’t enough (and it’s ultimately patronizing to “the gays”). The musical does not make a case that Tammy Faye is a significant figure, with a big enough story—let alone a heroic one besides that 1985 interview—to earn this kind of attention. Who was she really, beyond this musical’s surface-level treatment of her as a camp fever dream?
Even stranger, the final moments of Tammy Faye consigns Falwell and the other televangelists of the era to a safe long-gone history—as if what we have just watched is a distant memory of big hair, scandals, religious hypocrisy, and on-screen extremity.
This is as false an analysis as the imaginary hug between Tammy Faye and Steve. Televangelism didn’t die. The religious right remains a significant force in American politics—its influence is still exerted in the present-day Republican party, and its impact is still negatively experienced by LGBTQ people and women—and will likely be felt even more harshly over the next four years of Trump’s second administration.
And yet, at this perilous cultural moment with two extremely famous gay men at its helm, a musical opens on Broadway which glosses over the harms and malevolent power of this far-from-dead, far-from inert organism. Maybe next time the very gay and very powerful could bring the life of a true queer hero to Broadway.
