‘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.”