“Praise the Lord for ‘Tammy Faye,’” Matt Wolf exulted 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 big hairdo of the title character”.
Two years later, reviewing the Broadway transfer, Elisabeth Vincentelli begged to differ. “Disjointed, strangely bland,” he wrote, also in the Times. Trying to get “behind the mask of this complicated, outsized woman,” she argued, had made her “smaller than life.”
Critics, even those who are colleagues, disagree, sometimes in diametrically opposite ways. It’s part of the pleasure of criticism and going to the theater. But English transfers have been too pervasive of late to be random. The new musicals “Tammy Faye” and “Back to the Future,” as well as the recent revivals of “Cabaret” and “Sunset Boulevard,” are just some of the warmly reviewed shows in London to be welcomed to Broadway by a chilly New York Slap .
I am often one of the slappers. Take “Back to the Future.” The Telegraph gave the London production five stars and called it “a pleasant triumph”. I gave the Broadway version a hard time: “Less a large-scale new work than a semi-operable souvenir.”
Or please take Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cinderella.” “It’s not so much a dance as an explosion,” wrote Chris Wiegand in The Guardian of the 2021 London premiere. My take as she crossed the Atlantic after boldly changing her name to “Bad Cinderella”? “Surprisingly vulgar, sensual and stupid.” And that was mild. In “Time Out,” Adam Feldman described the new title as “a small victory for truth in marketing.”
More than the adjective was added when the show moved to Broadway, but I doubt a few new songs and a revised script were factors in nearly universal criticism. Nor does distaste for second-hand items explain the difference; the same model applies regardless of where production begins. Last month the Guardian called “The Lightning Thief,” an American musical that moved to London, “cute, boutique, original”; when I saw it on Broadway in 2019, it had “all the charm of a tension headache.”
So what explains the difference? Are American critics simply grumpier than their English colleagues?
Maybe there’s a little bit of that. West End productions were the gold standard for high-class dramas and 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 moves. But recalling decades in which London imports flooded the market – Broadway was said to be undergoing a “British invasion” in the 1980s – critics no longer hesitate, and sometimes even seem eager to refute the notion that anything from Shakespeare’s land must be worthy.
This is especially true when London shows tackle topics made in the United States. “Back to the Future,” although built by Americans and based on one of Hollywood’s most successful franchises, had a decidedly English accent on Broadway, as if subjected to multiple mistranslation robots. “Tammy Faye,” about the made-up Minnesota-born televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, missed the Midwestern bandwagon entirely, with its cold, flat satire of an overheated personality.
Both shows had been renewed for New York, apparently not for the better – and without the benefit of productions stepping in to test out the content changes.
Changes in scale also matter. Moving “Tammy Faye,” which had been playing at London’s 325-seat Almeida Theatre, to New York’s 1,650-seat Palace, was “madness,” Wolf told me. “In the intimacy of the Almeida, it really landed, but I think everyone knew it was still a work in progress and needed to be nurtured. Why, then, throw him into a huge house on Broadway with all guns blazing?
Maybe not all weapons. Andrew Rannells, who played Tammy Faye’s husband Jim Bakker in the London production, earning an Olivier Award nomination, withdrew before Broadway, citing contract disputes. (Christian Borle took over, looking a little sheepish.) “Bad Cinderella” was completely recast, mostly unconvincingly. However, importing West End stars can also pose problems. “Back to the Future” kept Roger Bart as Doc Brown and Hugh Coles as George McFly, both giving extremely overrated performances. The rest of the company, all new, played better by playing more directly.
Straight for Broadway, anyway. American critics, if not always audiences, have generally preferred naturalistic interpretations. In both plays and musicals, we – OK, I – want to see how “larger than life” characters became this way, in response to particulars of circumstance and soul. I’m interested in the drama of recognizably human behavior, not silly, silly figures or immediate, born-that-way monsters.
London theatre, with its longer and quite diverse history, seems to have a greater tolerance for stylistic extremes. The West End’s “Cinderella,” Wolf said, was “clearly part of the thriving panto tradition here, and was seen as a fun, frivolous addition to it.”
Likewise, expressionistic interpretations of naturalistically conceived characters are highly prized in London. As faded silent film star Norma Desmond in Jamie Lloyd’s cinematic staging of “Sunset Boulevard,” Nicole Scherzinger spent most of her time looking comatose in her slip. In Rebecca Frecknall’s environmental film “Cabaret,” Jessie Buckley did much the same. Yet Oliviers both won, as did the deliberately alienating productions, designed in Brechtian fashion to keep you at an emotional distance.
Objective achieved. When “Sunset Boulevard” and “Cabaret” came to Broadway, with Gayle Rankin replacing Buckley, critics were very divided. I wasn’t. I spent less time at each show feeling relevant feelings than wondering which genius lingerie company had won the underwear concession.
Wolf, a New Yorker who has lived his entire professional life in London, liked both. Once again, he sees the difference in critical reaction as an artifact of national character, expressed in preferred theatrical styles. “Brechtian distance is certainly not a problem for UK observers, who are more likely to bristle at overt emotionalism,” he told me. Indeed, he added, “I have heard many American plays derided in London for their 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.
Yet I have to wonder how much of the “national character” is actually just personal taste. There are many “sincere” English shows and many expressionist Americans. After all, most critics are aesthetic chameleons. Their reactions to the shows suggest no pattern, or a pattern too complicated to detect with the naked eye. Taste is a fingerprint.
It’s also a scar. (In college, where I directed plays and Wolf reviewed them, he once gave me mixed advice.) There is no truth in 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 dispute: everyone is right and no one knows why.