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    Why ‘Tammy Faye’ the Musical Feels Like a Redemption

    The televangelist defended gay men during the AIDS crisis. Now she’s getting perhaps the gayest tribute: a Broadway show led by Elton John.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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Review: Tammy Faye Was Over-the-Top. This Musical Makes Her Small.

    “Tammy Faye,” a bland, tonal mishmash of a show opening on Broadway, seems afraid to lean into what made the televangelist so distinctive.“Tammy Faye,” the new Broadway musical about the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, kicks off with a projection of a set of eyes in close-up, mascara running down in a dramatic streak.It’s a visually arresting reference to the real-life Bakker, whose electrifyingly made-up eyes, encased in clumped lashes, gave her a look of perpetually startled innocence. Not for nothing, there have been two films titled “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” — a documentary narrated by RuPaul in 2000 and a 2021 feature for which Jessica Chastain won an Academy Award for best actress. Together, they represent what Tammy Faye, who died in 2007, is now famous for: camp iconification and performance of the self.But after that teasing introduction, Tammy Faye’s signature Kabuki facade barely figures in the disjointed, strangely bland musical that opened on Thursday at the newly renovated Palace Theater. It is laudable that the show’s composer, Elton John; lyricist, Jake Shears (of Scissor Sisters); book writer, James Graham; and director, Rupert Goold, tried to go behind the mask of this complicated, outsize woman, whose public persona was shaped by and for television. The problem is that they ended up making her smaller than life.Brayben won an Olivier Award for her performance in the original production in London.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe show, which originated two years ago at the Almeida Theater in London, is a straightforward look at the rise and fall of Tammy Faye (Katie Brayben, who won an Olivier Award for her performance in the original production). The climb begins when she encounters Jim Bakker (Christian Borle, leaning hard on his comic skills) in the 1960s. The couple share a sunny vision of proselytizing Christianity, delivering their message through playful puppets rather than fiery sermons. We follow them as they take to the airwaves and pioneer the use of television to spread the gospel and raise a lot of cash. By the 1970s, they have their own satellite network, PTL, on which they host a popular program.And then the wheels fall off the wagon, as the Bakkers are swayed by money, sex and, in Tammy Faye’s case, pills.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    28 Broadway and Off Broadway Shows to See This Fall

    New York stages are welcoming Robert Downey Jr., Adam Driver, Audra McDonald and more this season.New York City stages are gearing up for a starry fall, with Robert Downey Jr. making his Broadway debut, Marisa Tomei and Jane Krakowski doing new plays, Adam Driver and Kenneth Branagh leading revivals, and Audra McDonald and Nicole Scherzinger stepping into two of the juiciest roles that musical theater has to offer. The overall abundance — on and Off Broadway — is cheering: Even away from the sparkle of celebrity, there are plenty of tempting shows by plenty of artists we’d be lucky to be in the room with.Broadway‘McNEAL’ Robert Downey Jr. makes his Broadway debut in this new drama by the Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar (“Disgraced”), playing an esteemed novelist with a potentially dicey interest in artificial intelligence. This Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Bartlett Sher, has a cast that includes Andrea Martin and Ruthie Ann Miles; Downey appears both live onstage and in a two-dimensional “metahuman digital likeness.” (Sept. 5-Nov. 24, Vivian Beaumont Theater)‘THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA’ Jez Butterworth and Sam Mendes had a hit with their last Broadway collaboration, “The Ferryman.” Now they’ve teamed up for this time-toggling Butterworth play about four English sisters whose mother raised them in the 1950s to have showbiz dreams, and who return home in the 1970s as she is dying. Laura Donnelly, a star of “The Ferryman,” leads the capacious cast. (Sept. 11-Dec. 8, Broadhurst Theater)Laura Donnelly, at the piano, leads the cast of Jez Butterworth’s “The Hills of California.”Mark Douet‘YELLOW FACE’ David Henry Hwang’s 2007 satire stars Daniel Dae Kim (“Lost”) as a fictional version of the playwright, navigating anti-Asian racism in the theater and culture, while — whoops — mistakenly casting a white actor in an Asian role. In 2018, The New York Times named this comedy one of the 25 best American plays of the previous 25 years. Leigh Silverman directs this Roundabout Theater staging. (Sept. 13-Nov. 24, Todd Haimes Theater)‘OUR TOWN’ Kenny Leon brings Thornton Wilder’s microcosmic drama back to Broadway, starring Jim Parsons (“The Big Bang Theory”) as the Stage Manager. Zoey Deutch and Ephraim Sykes play the young lovers, Emily Webb and George Gibbs, with Richard Thomas and Katie Holmes as Mr. and Mrs. Webb; Billy Eugene Jones and Michelle Wilson as Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs; and Julie Halston as Mrs. Soames. (Sept. 17-Jan. 19, Barrymore Theater)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Tammy Faye Bakker Is Broadway Bound. As a Musical.

    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

    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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    ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ Dominates Olivier Award Nominations

    Studio Ghibli’s fantastical movie was an unexpected choice for a stage adaptation. Now, it is up for 9 awards at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.A stage adaptation of “My Neighbour Totoro,” an animated Japanese children’s movie filled with fantastical creatures, emerged on Tuesday as the front-runner for this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The show, which ran at the Barbican Theater in London and included numerous giant puppets, secured nine nominations for the awards — more than any other play. Those included nods for best comedy, best director for Phelim McDermott and best actress for Mei Mac as a girl who discovers a magical world near her home.The play’s high number of nominations was perhaps unsurprising given that “My Neighbour Totoro” received rave reviews when it opened last year.Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, said the play’s puppets were “the most endearing sight on the London stage” at the time. Sarah Hemming in The Financial Times said the Royal Shakespeare Company production was “a tender, remarkably beautiful family show that extols kindness.”Although “My Neighbour” secured the most nominations, it did not get a nod for best new play. Instead, four more grown-up dramas will compete for that title. Those include “Prima Facie” at the Harold Pinter Theater, a Broadway-bound one-woman show about sexual assault that stars Jodie Comer; “Patriots” at the Almeida Theater, a retelling of President Vladimir V. Putin’s rise in Russia; and Aaron Sorkin’s “To Kill A Mockingbird” adaptation at the Gielgud Theater.Those shows will compete with “For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy,” a play at the Royal Court in London about six young Black men who meet for group therapy.Jodie Comer’s performance in “Prima Facie” struck a chord with West End audiences and she was also nominated for best actress. She is up for that title against Mei Mac of “My Neighbour Totoro,” as well as Patsy Ferran for “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Almeida Theater, Janet McTeer for “Phaedra” at the National Theater, and Nicola Walker for “The Corn Is Green,” also at the National.Before Tuesday’s announcement, many British theater critics had expected Emma Corrin to receive a nomination for “Orlando,” a play based on Virginia Woolf’s gender-fluid novel, at the Garrick Theater.That would have likely caused a media stir as Corrin, who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, has over the past year repeatedly urged award show organizers to make their acting categories gender neutral. Last year, Corrin told the BBC that it was “difficult for me” to be nonbinary and nominated in female acting categories.Emma De Souza, a spokeswoman for the Society of London Theater, the award’s organizers, said that Corrin was considered in the best actress category, but did not make the cut. “It was an incredibly competitive year,” De Souza added.The best actor award is set to be equally hard fought. Among the nominees are the rising Irish star Paul Mescal for “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Rafe Spall for “To Kill a Mockingbird” and David Tennant for “Good.” They will compete against Tom Hollander for his role as an oligarch in “Patriots” and Giles Terera, who starred in “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at the National Theater.In the musical categories, the nominations are led by “Standing at the Sky’s Edge,” also at the National. The show, about the residents of a housing complex in the northern English city of Sheffield, secured eight nominations, including best new musical. It will compete for that title with the “The Band’s Visit” at the Donmar Warehouse and “Sylvia” — a hip-hop musical based on the life of the suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst — at the Old Vic.Those three titles will face stiff competition from “Tammy Faye,” a high-profile production at the Almeida Theater that told the story of the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker using new music by Elton John.The winners of this year’s Olivier Awards will be announced on April 2 in a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London. More

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    Review: Praise the Lord for ‘Tammy Faye’

    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