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    Tammy Faye Bakker Is Broadway Bound. As a Musical.

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    A show about the televangelist, with songs by Elton John and Jake Shears, had a run in London last year and plans to open in New York next season.A new musical about Tammy Faye Bakker, the singing televangelist whose colorful life and collapsed ministry have repeatedly been dramatized for stage and screen, is pledging to open on Broadway next season.The show, called “Tammy Faye,” features music by Elton John and lyrics by Jake Shears of the Scissor Sisters. The musical had a run last year at the Almeida Theater in London, where the critic Matt Wolf called it “spectacularly entertaining.”The musical is being directed by Rupert Goold, the artistic director of the Almeida and a two-time Tony nominee for the plays “Ink” and “King Charles III.” The book is by James Graham, a prolific English playwright whose previous Broadway outings include “Ink” and the musical “Finding Neverland.”John and Shears, although best known for their careers in pop music, have both worked extensively in theater. John has written songs for many shows, including “The Lion King”; won a Tony Award for “Aida”; and is now also reworking a musical adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada” that was poorly received during an initial production in Chicago. Shears has not only written theater songs, but also performed in “Kinky Boots” on Broadway, and is currently starring in “Cabaret” in London.“Tammy Faye” explores the life and work of Bakker (she used the surname Messner in her final years), who had an enormously successful, and lucrative, television ministry in the 1970s and 1980s, that fell apart when her husband and partner in ministry, Jim Bakker, was indicted and then imprisoned for fraud.She was known for her big hair, her big personality and her big heart — her compassion for people with AIDS made her a popular figure among gay people often shunned by evangelicals. The musical explores her life in the context of the rise of a politically potent religious right in the United States.Bakker’s arc has proved irresistible to storytellers. Jessica Chastain won an Academy Award playing her in the 2021 film “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” and there have been several other stage projects.“Tammy Faye” is being produced by Rocket Stage, which is a theater production company established by John and his husband, David Furnish; Greene Light Stage, which is a production company established by Sally Greene, who has a business partnership with John; and James L. Nederlander, who is the president and chief executive of the Nederlander Organization.The producers said Friday that the musical would open at one of the nine Nederlander Broadway houses in the 2024-25 theater season; they did not specify which theater, and did not announce any casting.Andrew Rannells, who played Jim Bakker in London, and who is now starring in “Gutenberg! The Musical!” on Broadway, recently told Andy Cohen he was expecting the show to arrive on Broadway soon, but did not say whether he was continuing with the project. More

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      Steve Pieters, Pastor Who Spoke of AIDS in Famed Interview, Dies at 70

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      He had the disease and was interviewed on the PTL network in 1985 by Tammy Faye Bakker, a broadcast that was said to have changed minds and hearts.In 1985, when fear and homophobia were still driving much of the conversation surrounding AIDS, the Rev. A. Stephen Pieters, a gay pastor who had the disease, was a decidedly different voice.That May, at the St. Augustine by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Monica, Calif., presiding at a mass for people with AIDS attended by hundreds, he declared: “Rather than feel deserted by God, I have never been more sure of God’s love for me. God did not give me this disease. God is with me in this disease.”That September, he spoke to The Los Angeles Times about the ostracism people with AIDS were encountering.“Some people ask, ‘How is it different from cancer?’” he said. “Well, most people with cancer aren’t asked not to use the bathroom in a friend’s house or served dinner on paper plates. I’ve had more meals on paper plates in the last year than I’ve had in my whole life.”One appearance he made that year had a particularly profound impact: In November 1985 he was interviewed by Tammy Faye Bakker on the PTL (Praise the Lord) television network, which reached millions of Christian viewers, most of them conservative.It was a sympathetic interview in which Mr. Pieters spoke forthrightly about being gay and about his illness, and Ms. Bakker (who was then married to the televangelist Jim Bakker) urged her audience to be governed by compassion rather than intolerance and fear.“How sad,” she said, “that we as Christians, who are to be the salt of the earth, and we who are supposed to be able to love everyone, are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care.”The PTL network had an audience of millions, and in the years since, that interview has been credited with helping to change at least some viewers’ perceptions of gay people, AIDS and faith. Some televangelists had been implying or stating outright that AIDS was divine retribution for homosexuality. Ms. Bakker (who after a divorce and remarriage was later known as Tammy Faye Messner) called on Christians to instead show empathy.Among those impressed with her stand, many years later, was the actress Jessica Chastain, who won an Oscar last year for her role as Ms. Bakker in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” in which the interview with Mr. Pieters, portrayed by Randy Havens, was a pivotal scene. (A stage musical, “Tammy Faye,” which opened last year in London, also incorporated the 1985 interview.)“That interview was why I needed to make the movie,” Ms. Chastain told Variety at the movie’s New York premiere in 2021. “It was rebellious and brave and courageous and badass. I’m 100 percent convinced that there were people — conservative Christians watching at home — who realized that they had judged their family members unlovingly. I’m convinced that that interview saved families and saved lives.”If Ms. Bakker defied expectations with that interview, Mr. Pieters long defied AIDS, surviving for decades despite repeated health struggles. He died on July 8 at a hospital in Glendale, Calif., near Los Angeles. He was 70.His spokesman, Harlan Boll, said the cause was a sepsis infection.Mr. Pieters, who had continued his ministry and since 1994 had performed with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, was looking forward to the publication next year of his book, “Love Is Greater Than AIDS: A Memoir of Survival, Healing, and Hope.” In it, he said he was often asked why he thought he survived AIDS when so many others didn’t.“Whatever the reason,” he wrote, “I feel deeply grateful to be alive. So many gay men of my generation did not get to grow old. What a privilege to have reached the age of 70, still dancing with joy.”Albert Stephen Pieters was born on Aug. 2, 1952, in Lawrence, Mass. His father, Richard, was a mathematics teacher and wrestling coach at Phillips Academy, and his mother, Norma (Kenfield) Pieters, was a tax accountant and homemaker.“I knew that I was different from the time that I was about 3,” Mr. Pieters told Ms. Bakker in the 1985 interview, “and I grew up feeling like I didn’t quite fit in.”When he was a teenager, he said, he recognized that he was gay and talked to his pastor at a Congregational church about it.“He was freaked out,” he said. “He told me, ‘Don’t tell anybody; never say anything to anybody about it.’”He said that after graduating from Northwestern University in 1974 with a bachelor’s degree in speech, he joined the Metropolitan Community Church in Chicago and felt called to a ministry focused on gay people, that church’s main audience. He earned a master of divinity degree at McCormick Theological Seminary in 1979, then became pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church of Hartford, Conn., before moving to Los Angeles in the early 1980s. There he took a post at the Metropolitan Community Church of North Hollywood and, in 1984, received a diagnosis of AIDS, although he had been showing symptoms as early as 1982.He faced numerous health problems over the years, but just being around to face them was something of a victory: He said he’d been told in 1984 that he wouldn’t live out that year. The next year he spoke before a task force on AIDS in Los Angeles convened by Mayor Tom Bradley and Ed Edelman, a county supervisor, urging officials not to write off those who had already been diagnosed.“If I had succumbed to the hopelessness I constantly hear about AIDS,” he said, “I might have given up and not lived to see 1985.”Mr. Pieters is survived by a brother.At the 2021 opening of “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” Mr. Pieters commented on the impact of his 1985 interview.“I’ve had so many people over the years come up to me and say, ‘I saw your interview live, because my mother always had PTL on, and it changed my life because I realized I could be gay and Christian at the same time,’” he said. “Or, ‘It changed my life because I realized that AIDS was a reality, and I had to start taking care of myself.’”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      Review: Praise the Lord for ‘Tammy Faye’

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      A new musical about the life of the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, composed by Elton John, makes spectacular entertainment from a righteous subject.LONDON — Praise the lord for “Tammy Faye,” the new musical that opened Wednesday at London’s Almeida Theater. Telling the unlikely story — for the English stage at least — of the American televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, the show has a heart as big as the title character’s bouffant hairdo, and runs through Dec. 3.Rupert Goold’s vigorous production is also an increasing London rarity: a musical with an original score at a time when most repackage existing hits. That the composer is Elton John has only intensified interest in a project that also includes the Scissor Sisters frontman Jake Shears as lyricist and the prolific playwright James Graham as book writer. John’s most recent musical, “The Devil Wears Prada,” ran aground in Chicago over the summer, so it’s a relief to report that “Tammy Faye” is, for the most part, spectacularly entertaining, even if it could do with some trims and the toning down of a few tasteless sections.And when the astonishing Katie Brayben in the title role seizes center stage to rock out at the close of both acts, you can feel the intimate Almeida transformed into the sort of pulsating arena that Tammy Faye would surely love. “Show me mercy, open your hand,” she sings, letting rip in one of several impassioned numbers, “Empty Hands,” that comes from the gut. I was right there with her, as I was in the comparable “If You Came to See Me Cry” near the end, in which Tammy Faye reflects on her legacy from heaven. (Where else?)We know she’s headed there right from the start. The show begins with the revelation that Tammy Faye has colon cancer, and a sexually explicit joke that comes after the diagnosis indicates that this won’t exactly be family fare.We then turn back the decades to chart her progression from her modest Minnesota origins to a wealthy televisual messiah with a hotline to God. “If I hadn’t lived it,” she says, “I wouldn’t believe it.”Bunny Christie’s deliberately antiseptic set consists of a back wall of TV screens that allows for a recreation of the Praise the Lord satellite network that Tammy Faye and her first husband, Jim Bakker (the Broadway star Andrew Rannells, making a firm-voiced London debut), founded in the 1970s. Her second husband, Roe Messner, is never mentioned.Brayben, left, and others in “Tammy Faye.” Brayben displays such fervor and commitment in the title role that you fall under her sway.Marc Brenner John’s score throughout is a savvy amalgam of country twang and rousing pop-rock ensemble numbers. The musical, as expected, has campy fun with its subject, but doesn’t condescend, and Graham’s canny script always places the Bakkers in the historical context of a larger conservative movement whose presence is felt to this day. We note the importance at the time of Ronald Reagan, Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart, three men in the couple’s orbit who are presented as meanspirited foils of sorts to Tammy Faye’s worldview; Tammy Faye, by contrast, is all smiles and eyelashes, and Brayben communicates her generosity of spirit with ease.The show’s prevailing villain is Jerry Falwell (a sonorous Zubin Varla), who looks on in loathing at the Bakkers and is given more brooding solo numbers than the musical really needs: One would be enough. Falwell becomes the resident Iago of the piece, a rival consumed by envy who has no time for Tammy Faye’s tolerance of gay people.The second act dramatizes Tammy Faye’s famous 1985 interview with Steve Pieters (Ashley Campbell) the gay pastor and AIDS patient who finds in her a celebrity soul mate. (Love, Tammy Faye reports, gets many more mentions in the Bible than hate: 489 vs. 89, by her tally). It also charts the breakdown of the Bakkers’ blissful domestic life, when it was revealed that Jim had had a sexual encounter with Jessica Hahn, a church secretary, and was also sentenced to 45 years in prison for fraud.“Tammy Faye” is Goold’s third show this season on the stage of the Almeida, a theater he runs, after a coronavirus pandemic-delayed “Spring Awakening” and “Patriots,” a play about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Boris Berezovsky, an exiled Russian oligarch, that transfers to the West End next year. Goold and the choreographer Lynne Page have assembled a splendidly drilled ensemble that writhes and snakes across the stage in collective ecstasy. The show also hints at the fickle nature of that same crowd, who at one revealing moment turn on the couple in fury.Through it all, Brayben displays such fervor and commitment in the title role that you fall under the sway not just of Tammy Faye, but of a performer giving her career-enhancing all to a part that Brayben was born — Tammy Faye would surely say destined — to play.Tammy FayeThrough Dec. 3 at the Almeida Theater in London; almeida.co.uk. More

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      How Jessica Chastain Became Tammy Faye

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      To transform the actress into the title televangelist of “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” it took a little faith and a lot of artists.Jessica Chastain spent years pursuing the opportunity to play Tammy Faye Messner, the indefatigable star of Christian broadcasting. Better known to an audience of millions as Tammy Faye Bakker, she and Jim Bakker, her husband at the time, presided over the popular PTL television ministry until they were brought down in the late 1980s by financial and sex scandals.So when Chastain finally got that chance in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” a new biopic co-starring Andrew Garfield as Jim Bakker and directed by Michael Showalter, she was determined to look the part. As Chastain said of the woman behind her character: “She never really did anything halfway. She didn’t have an ounce of being cool or being aloof about her. So I just felt like I couldn’t dip my toe in or be cool and aloof in the performance. I had to jump in the most wild, extreme way. Because that’s how she lived every moment.”Chastain had done her own research for the film, which Searchlight Pictures released on Friday: she sought out magazine articles about Messner, who died in 2007, as well as old photographs and TV appearances. But making that transformation required a team of makeup, hair and wardrobe artists. Some of them had worked with Chastain before and they knew what they would be expected to deliver. “It’s basically what she says she wants,” said the hairstylist Stephanie Ingram, adding, “At that point you’ve just got to make it happen.”Here, Chastain and several of the artists who worked on “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” talk about how they were able to fill the TV personality’s shoes (not to mention her wigs, sequins and acrylics).ProstheticsJustin Raleigh, the film’s prosthetic makeup designer, and his team faced a twofold challenge. First, designing prosthetics (artificial skin appliances made of gel-filled silicone) that struck the right balance between character and performer: “Jessica wanted to be lost within the role and to really embody Tammy without completely obliterating Jessica as well,” Raleigh said. “We had a really careful dance of how much prosthetics we were going to use or not.” Second, creating consistent looks that would build up to Bakker in her most recognizable eras: “Working in reverse, once we established what we had to do for the 1980s and ’90s, the only way to make the rest of it work would be to add prosthetics to her younger look,” Raleigh explained. “We had to keep that level of continuity, anatomically speaking, throughout the entire film.”During the 1960s and ’70s, Chastain wore prosthetics on her cheeks, an appliance on her chin (to cover a dimple) and tape to pull up the tip of her nose. In scenes set in the ’80s, she added a body suit, a full neck prosthetic and an appliance on her upper lip; for the ’90s she added eye bags. Throughout, Raleigh said, “The cheeks were the hallmark element that had to carry all the way through.”Kelly Golden, center, the lead prosthetic applicator, and Justin Raleigh, the prosthetic makeup designer, work on Chastain before filming.Daniel McFadden/Searchlight PicturesTammy Faye Baker got bolder with her makeup as she got older, and so did the screen version.Daniel McFadden/Searchlight PicturesMakeupFor all the cosmetics that Messner wore — and as much as she was ridiculed for it — members of the makeup team said they wanted to avoid mockery. “It was just really making sure that nothing we did compromised the authenticity of who she was and that we never crossed a line into a caricature,” said the makeup artist Linda Dowds, who has worked with the actress on 15 movies, beginning with the 2013 horror film “Mama.”Dowds, who headed the makeup department on “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” said there always had to be a “beauty element” in how the character used makeup: “She absolutely loved makeup and she loved looking the way she did in makeup. She just got bolder with it.”Pink was a prominent color in her youthful palette, but over time, her coloring got darker and she tattooed her eyeliner, eyebrows and lip liner (recreated with marker on Chastain). “We also had a lot more lashes to deal with — we went from one coat of mascara to four or five,” Dowds said. “She would say things in interviews like, ‘Who said you can’t put mascara on false lashes? Where do these rules come from? You don’t have to be dowdy to be Christian.’”CostumesTo build a wardrobe for the onscreen Tammy Faye, the film’s costume designer, Mitchell Travers, had to get into her character, too: “Honestly, I went shopping like Tammy did,” Travers said. “She had an expression where she would say that shopping was her favorite cardio. And she was a woman who loved the hunt.”He scoured swap meets and estate sales, shopped on Etsy and at T.J. Maxx, in search of clothes for a woman who wanted to look powerful even before she could afford to and who later had access to money, then lost it.“I could tell the story of what it was like to be comfortable with money and almost forget that things had prices,” Travers said. “And I could also tell the story of what it was like to have lost it all and the pressure to live up to that persona when you didn’t have the funds.”At her 1980s zenith, the character’s apparel looked new and everything about it was big: the shoulder pads, the clip-on earrings, the polka dots. And for Tammy Faye’s post-PTL life, Travers said, he tried to reuse earlier looks he’d already assembled, “so that you get the sense that it’s a woman holding onto something that used to be there but it’s not coming as easily.”The costumes were intended to reflect Tammy Faye’s growing comfort with money.Fox Searchlight PicturesHairGetting Chastain’s hair to look like Tammy Faye’s memorable tresses required no less than 11 wigs: brunette ones for her youth; big blond ones for her heyday in the ’80s and red ones for her later years — even a removable wig with a built-in headband that Chastain could pull off to reveal the character’s short, spindly locks (in fact, another wig). And don’t assume that Stephanie Ingram, head of the film’s hair department and another veteran of many Chastain projects, simply found these wigs on a store shelf.“It’s funny because people say, ‘You take ’em out of the box, you put ’em on,’” Ingram said. “I’m like, mmm, no, you don’t.” Some wigs were colored and fit to Chastain’s specifications and others were made custom for her. A given day on set could also call for five to 10 more stylists to provide period hair for the rest of the cast. Near the end of the shoot, when Tammy Faye asks for a divorce from her husband, Ingram said, “I just fell apart. I guess my body just went, oh my God, you actually did it.”PerformancePlaying a role under many layers of wigs, clothing, makeup and silicone was a largely new process for Chastain. She said her closest previous experience was portraying the dowdy heroine in a Broadway production of “The Heiress,” on which she didn’t have the benefit of such a large artistic team: “I had a prosthetic nose, which I applied myself,” she said. “So I have the utmost respect for what they do. Because it was really hard.”Turning herself into Tammy Faye each day could sometimes take as long as five to seven hours, even before any filming started, but Chastain said that lengthy preparation at least offered her the additional time to connect with her character. “When you sit in a chair for that long it can be draining,” Chastain said. “I was constantly watching videos of her, listening to her voice. I was using it as a runway. Sometimes when you’re playing a character, you get a 30-minute runway, and then you take off and you’re shooting. My character had an extra-long runway.” More

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      ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’ Review: Fall From Grace

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      Tammy Faye Bakker gets the celebrity biopic treatment in a new movie starring Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield.If you were watching television in America in the 1970s and ’80s — the old three-network days that now seem as distant as the horse-and-buggy era — you could hardly miss Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Upbeat evangelists with the upper Midwest in their voices, they helped expand Christian broadcasting from a niche into an empire via their PTL satellite network.Even if you missed them in their prime, you couldn’t avoid the spectacle of their downfall — an end-of-the-80s tabloid scandal involving adultery, hypocrisy and financial shenanigans. In 1989, Jim Bakker was convicted of fraud and sentenced to federal prison. His wife (who had divorced him a few years later) was razzed by talk-show hosts and standup comedians across the land for her gaudy makeup, her big hair and her full-throated singing voice.“The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” directed by Michael Showalter from a script by Abe Sylvia, tells this story dutifully, following the familiar showbiz biopic sequence of rise, ruin and redemption. We start out in Eisenhower-era Minnesota, where Tammy Faye (Jessica Chastain) grows up in the shadow of a pious, unsmiling mother (Cherry Jones). When she meets Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) at Bible college, it seems like a providential match.Jim preaches a version of the prosperity gospel, insisting to his flock that God wants them to be rich. This optimism, and the worldly ambition that comes with it, appeal to Tammy. A natural performer onstage (and later, on camera), she brings maternal warmth, wholesome sex appeal and relentless good cheer to their itinerant ministry. And puppets, too.Showalter’s film shares its title and its plot with a 2000 documentary by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, and also sympathy for its subject. Tammy Faye (who died in 2007) may have been an over-the-top spendthrift and an exhausting media personality, but she was also, these movies insist, sincere in her faith and generous in her view of humanity. Unlike the reverends Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds), powerful allies of her husband, she resisted mixing religion and politics, and defied their anti-feminist, anti-gay culture-war ideology.The documentary version, which includes voice-over narration by RuPaul, understands Tammy Faye as a camp figure, earning both sympathy and ridicule, and emerging with a measure of dignity intact. Showalter and his cast lack the style and the nerve to convey either the wildness of the character and her milieu or the pathos of her story.The narrative beats — Tammy Faye’s temptation (in the presence of a hunky record producer played by Mark Wystrach), Jim’s betrayal, Falwell’s treachery — seem almost generic. The performances, while hardly subtle, feel smaller than life. Garfield mugs and emotes with sketch-comedy abandon, and while Chastain tries for more depth and nuance, she is trapped by a literal-minded script and overwhelmed by hair, makeup and garish period costumes.The Bakkers were many things to many people: appalling, inspiring, laughable, sad. This movie succeeds in making them dull.The Eyes of Tammy FayeRated PG-13. A handful of commandments violated. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More