Elton John’s $25m Broadway musical announces closure just five days after opening

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Elton John’s multimillion-dollar musical Tammy Fayehas announced it is to close, just five days after opening night.

The Broadway show, based on the life of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, opened on November 14.

It quickly failed to fill audience capacity. In the week ending 17 November, it drew a gross of $374,371 with an overall attendance of 5,732 (63 percent of capacity).

It will close with a final performance at New York’s Palace Theatre on December 8, after just 24 previews and 29 regular performances.

The reviews have been scathing, with the New York Post calling it “a disaster of biblical proportions.”

Another damning review from Variety writes of the show’s conclusion: “Tammy finally comes to terms with her all-too-mortal sins and sees the light of a presumably forgiving God. Audiences may not be so charitably inclined.”

According to reports, Tammy Fayewas capitalized at $25m and will lose it all.

Tammy Faye featured music by Elton John, lyrics by Jake Shears of the Scissor Sisters and a book by Dear Englandplaywright James Graham.

It starred Katie Brayben in the title role, with Christian Borle as her husband Jim Bakker and Michael Cerveris as fellow televangelist Jerry Falwell.

The production previously ran in London from October to December 2022. Brayben originated the role of Tammy Faye, with Andrew Rannells as her husband and Zubin Varla as Falwell.

In 2022, the life of Tammy Faye Bakker was adapted into a movie biopic starring Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield.

In a three-star review of the film, The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey wrote: “The Eyes of Tammy Faye encourages us to drink in every detail of Jessica Chastain’s physical transformation. Playing the gaudy but luminous televangelist and queer icon Tammy Faye Messner – and the latest ‘misunderstood woman in history’ to be given the biopic treatment – Chastain sports spidery lashes, goldilocks ringlets, splotchy white eyeshadow and two prosthetic chipmunk cheeks. Besparkled to an excess, she borders on the ridiculous.

“But ‘ridiculous’ is a fairly precise summary of Tammy Faye’s public perception in late Eighties America. A television personality treated as both an Evangelical oddity and a figure of camp fun, she’d been made a scapegoat for her then-husband, the duplicitous Jim Bakker. He would go on to be accused of rape and later convicted for mail and wire fraud – it’s no surprise that he was punished only for misusing people’s money, not the alleged sexual assault. Tammy Faye’s personal extravagance, both in dress and in the way she expressed emotion, was treated as an equal sin.”

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