‘Tammy Faye’ and ‘Cinderella’ Were Hits in London but Failed on Broadway

“Praise the lord for ‘Tammy Faye,’” Matt Wolf cheered in The New York Times when the Elton John musical opened in London in 2022. The show, Wolf added, “has a heart as big as the title character’s bouffant hairdo.”

Two years later, reviewing the Broadway transfer, Elisabeth Vincentelli begged to differ. “Disjointed, strangely bland,” she wrote, also in The Times. Trying to go “behind the mask of this complicated, outsize woman,” she argued, had made her “smaller than life.”

Critics, even those who are colleagues, disagree, sometimes diametrically. That’s part of the pleasure of criticism — and of theatergoing. But pans of English transfers have been too pervasive of late to be random. The new musicals “Tammy Faye” and “Back to the Future,” as well as recent revivals of “Cabaret” and “Sunset Boulevard,” are just a few of the shows warmly reviewed in London to be greeted on Broadway by a cold New York slap.

I’m often one of the slappers. Take “Back to the Future.” The Telegraph gave the London production five stars and called it “a feelgood triumph.” I gave the Broadway version a hard time: “Less a full-scale new work than a semi-operable souvenir.”

Or take, please, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cinderella.” “It adds up to not so much a ball as a blast,” Chris Wiegand wrote in The Guardian of the 2021 London premiere. My take when it crossed the Atlantic after changing its name, daringly, to “Bad Cinderella”? “Surprisingly vulgar, sexed-up and dumbed-down.” And that was mild. In “Time Out,” Adam Feldman described the new title as “a minor victory for truth in marketing.”

More than the adjective was added when the show moved to Broadway, but I doubt a few fresh songs and a revised script were factors in the almost universal critical brickbats. Nor does a distaste for hand-me-downs explain the difference; the same pattern applies regardless of where a production begins. Last month The Guardian called “The Lightning Thief,” an American musical that transferred to London, “cute, boutique, original”; when I saw it on Broadway in 2019, it had “all the charm of a tension headache.”

So what does explain the difference? Are American critics just grumpier than their English counterparts?

Perhaps there’s a little of that. West End productions used to be the gold standard for high-class dramas and event musicals. In some cases, they still are: “The Lehman Trilogy,” “The Hills of California,” “Six” and “& Juliet” were all greeted on Broadway with praise that seemed to justify their transfers. But recalling decades in which London imports flooded the market — Broadway in the 1980s was said to be suffering a “British invasion” — critics no longer hesitate, and sometimes even seem eager, to refute the idea that whatever comes from the land of Shakespeare must be worthy.

That’s especially true when London shows tackle stateside subjects. “Back to the Future,” though built by Americans and based on one of Hollywood’s most successful franchises, had a distinctly English accent on Broadway, as if put through multiple mistranslation bots. “Tammy Faye,” about the heavily made-up Minnesota-born televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, missed the Midwestern boat entirely, with its cool, flat satire of an overheated personality.

Both shows had been revamped for New York, apparently not for the better — and without the benefit of intervening productions to stress-test the changes of content.

Changes of scale matter too. Moving “Tammy Faye,” which had played the 325-seat Almeida Theater in London, to the 1,650-seat Palace in New York, was “insanity,” Wolf told me. “Within the intimacy of the Almeida, it really landed, but I think everyone knew it was nonetheless a work in progress and needed nurturing. Why, then, catapult it to a huge Broadway house all guns blazing?”

Perhaps not all guns. Andrew Rannells, who played Tammy Faye’s husband Jim Bakker in the London production, earning an Olivier award nomination, dropped out before Broadway, citing contract disputes. (Christian Borle took over, looking a little sheepish.) “Bad Cinderella” was completely recast, mostly unconvincingly. Yet importing the West End stars can also import problems. “Back to the Future” retained Roger Bart as Doc Brown and Hugh Coles as George McFly, both giving hugely overstated performances. The rest of the company, all new, played it better by playing it straighter.

Straighter for Broadway, anyway. American critics, if not always audiences, have generally preferred naturalistic interpretations. Whether in plays or in musicals, we — OK, I — want to see how “larger than life” characters got that way, in response to particulars of circumstance and soul. I’m interested in the drama of recognizably human behavior, not in goofy, pratfalling ciphers or unmediated, born-that-way monsters.

London theater, with its longer and quite different history, appears to have a greater tolerance for stylistic extremes. The West End “Cinderella,” Wolf said, was “clearly part of the thriving panto tradition here, and seen as a fun and frivolous addition to it.”

Likewise, expressionistic interpretations of naturalistically conceived characters are highly praised in London. As the faded silent-movie star Norma Desmond in Jamie Lloyd’s filmic staging of “Sunset Boulevard,” Nicole Scherzinger spent most of the time looking comatose in a slip. In Rebecca Frecknall’s environmental “Cabaret,” Jessie Buckley did much the same. Yet both won Oliviers, and so did the deliberately alienating productions, designed in the Brechtian manner to keep you at an emotional distance.

Goal achieved. When “Sunset Boulevard” and “Cabaret” came to Broadway, with Gayle Rankin replacing Buckley, critics were highly divided. I was not. I spent less time at each show feeling relevant feelings than wondering which genius lingerie company had snagged the underwear concession.

Wolf, a New Yorker who has lived his entire professional life in London, liked both. Again, he sees the difference in critical reaction as an artifact of national character, expressed in preferred theatrical styles. “Brechtian distance is certainly not an issue for U.K. observers, who are more likely to chafe at overt emotionalism,” he told me. In fact, he added, “I’ve heard many a U.S. hit play derided in London for sentimentality and so-called special pleading.”

Point taken. The Times of New York may have given “Slave Play” raves but The Times of London found it indulgent. Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning works by Paula Vogel, Wendy Wasserstein, Terrence McNally and Donald Margulies have all been dismissed abroad.

And yet I have to ask myself how much of “national character” is really just personal taste. There are plenty of “sincere” English shows, and plenty of expressionistic American ones. For that matter, most critics are aesthetic chameleons. Their reactions to shows suggest no pattern at all, or a pattern too complicated to be discerned with the naked eye. Taste is a fingerprint.

It is also a scar. (In college, where I directed plays and Wolf reviewed them, he once gave me a mixed notice.) There’s no truth to criticism beyond loving what we love and licking our wounds. That London shows are often panned in New York is, beyond that, inexplicable. Think of it as a supranational marital spat: Everyone’s right and no one knows why.