There are some shows you never expect to see, and a musical about a gay-friendly televangelist and America’s Christian right in the Seventies and Eighties by Elton John, James Graham and Jake ‘Scissor Sisters’ Shears is one of them. But here it is and praise the lord, it’s a religious riot.
Katie Brayben plays the titular TV preacher with eyes full of sympathetic tears, lungs of steel, and a wardrobe and wigs from the ninth circle of hell. Elton’s music wittily blends gospel and revivalist soul with the pop of Tammy Faye’s heyday and some almost vaudevillian comic songs. The madcap, cartoonish energy of Rupert Goold’s production sugars the serious point that religious corruption and political influence is very much still alive in America, and elsewhere.
Amid the evangelical media boom of the Seventies, small-town North Carolina Methodist Jim Bakker (Andrew Rannells, redeploying the cheesy anxiety he brought to The Book of Mormon) and his wife were miraculously gifted a religious satellite channel by Ted Turner. Tammy Faye, initially the sidekick, proved the star, blending the God-bothering with lifestyle content, and exuding telegenic relatability. If she asked for money, people sent it. Again and again. Soon the Bakkers built personal fortunes and a theme park on “credit… which is another word for faith”.
The couple’s greed and profligacy – and the sexual misconduct of Bakker and his fellow preachers – is contrasted with Tammy Faye’s genuine empathy, particularly when she embraces a young pastor with AIDS live on air. In the opening scene, set late in her life, she may mistake her proctologist for God, but the show doesn’t doubt her faith. Graham takes a less nuanced approach to Jerry Falwell (Zubin Varla), depicted as a Machiavelli intent on reuniting church and state under Ronald Reagan and installing an anti-gay, anti-abortion (and low-tax) agenda.
Turning this story into a musical heightens its absurdity. There is a knowing snicker to the anthem He’s Inside Me: other songs like He Promised Me and Look How Far We’ve Fallen are hilariously scathing. Brayben clucks around like a bright-plumaged hen until required to unleash her devastating, powerhouse voice, most notably on the penultimate number If You Came to See Me Cry. Talking heads, including Pope John Paul II and Archbishop Runcie, pop out of the bank of TV screens that dominates Bunny Christie’s set.
You can sometimes hear Shears reaching for rhymes in his lyrics, it’s true. And none of the characters is truly three-dimensional. But that’s not the point. This is a carnivalesque takedown of something rotten. Graham, always even-handed, draws a distinction between true believers and hypocrites. In a late scene where Tammy gets to meet Falwell and Billy Graham in Purgatory – yes, really – she points out that the word ‘love’ is used in the Bible 489 times and ‘hate’’ just 89. I love this show.
