Fall Preview: Director Rupert Goold Thinks Tammy Faye Could Give the Broadway Canon Its Next Great Diva

A director’s job is to coax humanity from a character, but Rupert Goold’s special knack is making characters of humans—rich ones who touch something universal with their biographical specificity. He helped make a Shakespearean meal of (at the time) a theoretical future King Charles III, crafted an artful Faust out of tabloid king Rupert Murdoch in Ink, and in last season’s Patriots, turned Vladimir Putin into Frankenstein’s monster.

Televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker—the subject of Tammy Faye, a new musical with a book by Ink playwright James Graham that Goold directs this fall at the Palace Theatre—may seem out of place in this menacing group of historical characters. One reason being she (unlike King Charles, Murdoch or Putin) will be singing and dancing in the show about her life. And to a brand-new Elton John score at that. But just like all those men, Goold says, she’s a “properly complex three-dimensional character.”

“Tammy was from a Christian movement that was associated with the moral majority and conservatism. And yet she became this LGBTQ icon and was central to the centering of the AIDS discussion in this country,” Goold tells The Broadway Show. Oh yeah, and she also found herself in the middle of a financial fraud scheme that landed her husband and partner in evangelism, Jim Bakker, in federal prison. Properly complex.

“She’s definitely flawed, but with a big heart,” Goold explains, drawing parallels to Judy Garland, a grande dame (who also famously played the Palace) whose likeness he captured in his Renée Zellweger-led film Judy. “They're not a zillion miles apart,” he says, gesturing to the glamor, mystique and flamboyant appeal—the same qualities that also make Tammy Faye, dare we say, fun.

“People really had smiles on their faces when we did it before,” says Goold about the show’s 2022 London run, starring Katie Brayben, who will reprise her Olivier Award-winning performance on Broadway opposite Christian Borle. “Americans are really great with high art and serious drama. And then they're also brilliant with musical comedy,” he adds. “It’s in a great diva musical comedy tradition that you get in Mame or Hello, Dolly! I find [Tammy] as a character really moving, but there's also a kind of joy in the material.”

See Goold talk about Tammy Faye in the clip below.