What will Elton John learn from Tammy Faye’s flop on Broadway?

Amid much hype and excitement last year, Sir Elton John, that most consistently busy of rock ’n’ roll stars, announced that he was going to retire from touring so that he could spend more time with his young children. Yet John has been nothing if not productive — and his definition of “retirement” has been more elastic than most seventy-seven-year-olds. In the last year alone, since he played his final full concert in Stockholm on July 8, 2023, he has participated in a major documentary, Elton John: Never Too Late, for which he has written a new song, performed at a high-profile international business event at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London last month and now has seen his latest musical, Tammy Faye, transfer to Broadway. If this is taking it easy, I’d hate to imagine what the spectacle of Sir Elton exerting himself looks like.

Still, he will have more leisure time on his hands than he might have imagined earlier in the year as Tammy Faye, based on the life of the televangelist Tammy Faye Messner and written with the Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears and the prolific British playwright James Graham, has proved an almighty, cast-iron flop. It is closing early, on December 8, after playing a mere twenty-four preview performances and twenty-nine regular shows, and will have lost a rather shocking $25 million in the process. It received some of the most damning reviews any major show has received in recent memory. Variety called it “as messy as Tammy’s mascara” and the New York Times said of the “disjointed, strangely bland” musical’s protagonist that “[its makers] ended up making her smaller than life.”

Its failure mirrors that of American Psycho, another import from London’s Almeida Theater, again directed by that theater’s artistic director Rupert Goold, and again had a warm reception in the UK, only to be traduced and panned when it reached Broadway. Perhaps London theater critics are excessively generous — or maybe Americans don’t take kindly to having their own culture and heritage served up to them by the Brits. Or, simply, the musical isn’t very good. In any case, it will now join the ranks of the most egregious failures that have lain down and died on the Great White Way over the past couple of decades. Tammy, you know, would be (rock and) rolling in her grave.

John has, of course, been involved with one of the most successful modern musicals of all time, in the form of The Lion King, although it is notable that most of the songs used in that were originally written for the Disney film. When he’s struck out on his own, the results have been variable, to put it kindly. His 2009 musical Lestat was a notorious flop (although, at thirty-nine regular performances, it still played longer than Tammy Faye), and although his 2000 musical Aida was a Tony Award-winning success, it has yet to be staged in London, perhaps because British producers might believe that, given the enduring popularity of the Verdi opera that it was based on, audiences might wish to see the real thing rather than the dumbed-down version.

Elton John is himself a creation worthy of musical theater. He is glitzy, gaudy, larger-than-life, winningly self-deprecating — anyone who’s read his magnificent autobiography Me will know that he’s the first to realize when the game is up — and will brush off the failure of Tammy Faye as “just one of those things.” Still, another reckoning lies in wait for him shortly. A new version of his much-panned musical adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada is to open in London, with Vanessa Williams starring as the monstrous Miranda Priestly, the role made famous on film by Meryl Streep. If this crashes and burns as well, then perhaps it will be time for the one-time Rocket Man to acknowledge that it has been a long, long time since he’s had a hit on stage, and that a return to the launchpad is now overdue.