| Tammy Faye - long | |
| Posted by: AnObserver 04:02 pm EST 12/01/24 | |
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| I saw Tammy Faye. Although the crew and musicians and ushers, etc. may be sorry to be out of work - and the actors as well, of course - the actors may also be glad they don’t have to go on and pretend the show is great, because certainly they know it isn’t, don’t they? Perhaps Katie Brayben thinks it is, since she’s the only one to have done it previously, and she got a big award for slogging through it. She’s a good actor, and I guess she’s a good singer, but since the show is so over-amplified, it’s hard to tell. And during the singing of all the songs, not just hers, I yearned for supertitles during 50% of the time, since it was hard to catch the lyrics. I attribute this to amplification, or perhaps it was the lost art of enunciation. I’m not talking to you, Ethel Merman. Brayben is good, but I wouldn’t say she’s a “star.” Merman was a star. Liza, Lena, Judy, Ethel, Dolores, Barbra, Bette M. All stars. Christian Borle is a technician with some gifts, but he’s not a star in my book. Michael Cerveris, for all his talents, is not a star. None of them radiate freakish charisma. (The real Tammy Faye, in spite of her sleazy world and choices, did have charisma, for better or worse.) The star here is Elton John. The bio/explanation of Rocket Stage (the first producer listed) mentions David Furnish, who is Elton John’s husband. And John’s score here is generic and bland and instantly forgettable. I came home and googled the words “tammy faye bland” and “tammy faye generic” to see if any of the critics agreed with me, and the first thing that appeared was Vincentelli’s New York Times review using both generic and bland. I don't think Vincentelli was referring only to the music. The expensive set is also bland, in spite of its various tricks, and one gets tired of looking at it. And it overpowers the actors. The most charismatic actor up there is a guy named Mark Evans who plays Billy Graham (Graham did not have a pompadour, by the way) and a journalist from the Charlotte Observer (Evans manages to submerge his charisma for that role) and the pornographer Larry Flynt. I felt sorry for Cerveris, because of some of the staging he has to do. Back to the score: every pop anthem sounds like the next pop anthem, and every upbeat tune sounds like the next upbeat tune. And you can feel them coming, and you think, “Oh, no, not another song.” And then you remember it’s a musical. It might have worked better as a satirical play. But no one wants to see that nowadays, either. I understand the book writer wrote a good play called Ink about the Murdoch business, and that was on Broadway too. But that was 2019. Some critics did not do their research: Tammy Faye Bakker did not hug an AIDS patient. She spoke with him via satellite. He was in California. She said she wished she could hug him. But Princess Diana did hug an AIDS patient. Is Sir Elton getting confused about his friend Princess Di? Or perhaps facts don’t matter. As some critics have pointed out, one of the things the show wants to be about, but can’t settle on anything, is “female empowerment.” And when it wants to be about that, oh, boy (girl), does it want to be. One misogynist crack would have been enough. George Balanchine once said, “Ballet is female.” And one could say, “Broadway is female.” See above: Merman, Liza, Bette, Channing, Bacall, Burnett, Andrews, Lansbury, Ebersole, LuPone, McKechnie, etc. We - the Broadway audience - don’t need to be hit over the head with female empowerment. We get it. Look at Gypsy, for instance. It’s about female empowerment, but it’s not overstated. The women are there doing what they do and sometimes doing it great. That’s enough. But Laurents and Robbins and the rest knew what they were doing. (Every new musical show on Broadway for the past several years has female empowerment preaching.) I keep going back to Vincentelli’s New York Times review in early 2020 of the Off Broadway revival of The Unsinkable Molly Brown. In that reworking Molly was painted as a social justice warrior/saint. The extramarital flirtation that Molly had in the original production, and the movie, was given to the husband so the wife, Molly, could be clean. And female Vincentelli said, “Where’s the moral ambiguity?” Tammy Faye never really presents the question, “Was Tammy also a charlatan or not?” Everyone else is in the show, but the creators seem to think she’s clean. Does Elton John see himself in this Tammy? I’m wondering if anyone else noticed a moment in Tammy Faye that seemed odd, among so many odd moments. It’s when Jim Bakker goes to meet with Ted Turner. That meeting happens offstage. I’m wondering if at one point it was onstage and Tammy was included and perhaps that meeting was musicalized. To keep an overlong show from being any longer, perhaps it was there and cut. Oh, well. It doesn’t matter. There was a time when people complained about some of the movies John Schlesinger (who was English) made in and about the USA, because those people thought his movies were anti-American. Midnight Cowboy (which won the Best Picture Oscar) and Day of the Locust and Honky Tonk Freeway. Some thought his career fizzled out because of it. The influential American critic Pauline Kael really did not like Cowboy and Locust because she found his work heavy-handed. She was kinder to Sunday Bloody Sunday which was made in England and it was set in London and it was about English people. Therefore, perhaps the problem with Tammy Faye is that it’s a Brit outlook on cartoonish America. Almost as if the even more heavy-handed Brit movie director Ken Russell decided to do a music theatre piece about a bit of America. (E. John, director R. Goold and book writer James Graham are all Brits. Furnish is Canadian.) About Midnight Cowboy, Kael wrote: “If Schlesinger could extend the same sympathy to the other Americans that he extends to Joe Buck and Ratso, the picture might make better sense…Schlesinger keeps pounding away at America, determined to expose how horrible the people are, to dehumanize the people these two are part of. The spray of venom in these pictures [Petulia and Goodbye, Columbus were two of the other films she was writing about] is so obviously the directors’ way of showing off that we begin to discount it.” Regarding the actors having to continue doing the show for another week, I’m reminded of a story about the last play on Broadway that Tennessee Williams had when he was alive. It was called Clothes For A Summer Hotel starring Geraldine Page. It got bad reviews and looked as if it would close soon after opening. However, Williams put up some of his own money to keep it running and Page said, “Couldn’t the son of a bitch at least let us get out quick?” I’ve been trying to think of a role that Brayben could do well. Brit actors succeed with Williams. Perhaps Brayben would be a good Stella Kowalski. There’s probably a musical role for her too, in which she can shine better. At one point in Tammy Faye someone, I think it’s the Falwell character, says something like, “The liberal Marxists want to end capitalism,” and a few in the audience cheered. Do they know that capitalism is the reason the show got done? I don’t think super-rich Sir Elton wants to end capitalism, and, yes, I know, he has a foundation and does good works. I just enjoy observing all these little ironies. Not too many Broadway musicals bring up the subject of capitalism and destroying it! Of course the audience was rude and self-involved and sloppily dressed and there was the usual “woo-woo” nonsense and the annoying standing ovation at the end, even though the audience was sparse. And they didn’t all stand. Some other people must have known they had witnessed a stinker. As I was leaving, I heard someone say, “Well, it wasn’t as bad as Spider-Man.” It was fun to be in the Palace Theatre and I’ll probably never go there again. If you do go, the entrance is now on the side street, and in the mezzanine level lobby there’s a glassed-in display about Garland and Lillian Russell and Betty Hutton and more, and there’s also a restroom off that mezz. lobby. The ushers and people working there were very pleasant and helpful. Times Square is more than ever a possibly dangerous madhouse. It’s so unpleasant to be there, on the sidewalk and streets and plazas. I thought it was bad 20 years ago. Now it’s worse. It will be interesting to see if the congestion pricing makes it better or worse. Is the Almeida Theatre in London officially a West End theatre? Critics say it is. Tammy Faye started there. It has somewhere between 300-350 seats. Wouldn’t it need more than that to qualify as West End? I think a Bway theatre needs 500 seats to qualify as Bway. |
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