Elton John is blaming politics for the failure of his musical “Tammy Faye.”
The EGOT winner, 78, spoke in regards to the expensive present that he produced having a short-lived run on Broadway in an interview with The Sunday Instances printed Friday.
“We put out two musicals recently, one a huge flop in America and the other a huge hit in England,” John mentioned, referring to “Tammy Faye” and “The Devil Wears Prada.”
“‘Tammy Faye’ came out during the U.S. election, and it’s all about how the integration of church and state ruined America, which Ronald Reagan did,” he defined. “It was too political for America. They don’t really get irony.”
“Tammy Faye” tells the story of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, the favored Seventies and ‘80s televangelists who shook up non secular TV with upbeat prayer, inspirational interviews and selection acts. One plotline of the musical considerations how the rise of TV preachers helped Ronald Reagan win the presidency.
The manufacturing debuted on the West Finish in London in 2022, the place it received two Laurence Olivier Awards.
The Broadway present, which was reportedly capitalized at $25 million, opened on Broadway on Nov. 14, 2024 on the Palace Theatre. It shut down only a few weeks later.
In a one-star evaluation, The Submit’s Johnny Oleksinski mentioned John’s rating was made up of “Saltine-cracker songs that are forgotten the moment the audience applauds.”
The evaluation added, “Go in cold, and you’ll leave with no idea about how famous Jim and Tammy were or why you’ve just sat through a musical about them.”
Just a few days after the present closed, Elton appeared accountable Donald Trump for the epic failure.
“It’s a fairly political piece of work,” he mentioned in an interview with Time journal in December. “And with that you have to press somebody’s buttons. The buttons we pressed last night with the critics weren’t the right ones.”
John beforehand instructed The Hollywood Reporter that he was “always incredibly fascinated” by Tammy Faye Bakker, “so when we got the chance to write the musical, I jumped at it, because I love interesting people like that who have had great success and then been banished and lost everything, and then come back because of their faith and because of their belief, and turn the tables.”
John’s hits on Broadway embrace the Tony Award-winning “The Lion King” and “Billy Elliot: The Musical.”
His “The Devil Wears Prada” present, primarily based on the 2006 movie starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, opened in London in December to extra scathing opinions.
In one other one-star evaluation, The Submit known as “Prada” “a dud about duds” and “a haute mess.”
