History of “The Gospel

According to Tammy Faye”

In the fall of 2004, J.T. Buck, Fernando Dovalina and John Garrett were enrolled in a musical collaboration class at the University of Houston. The class was taught by Stuart Ostrow, the Tony award-winning Broadway producer of such hits as Pippin, 1776 and M. Butterfly.  

Friendships blossomed, and in December, Buck approached Dovalina about collaborating on a musical, one based on the life of Tammy Faye Bakker, now Tammy Faye Messner. Messner and her then husband, Jim Bakker, built the most ambitious televangelist empire in the world, one that became a pattern for those that followed. But their world collapsed in a swirl of sexual scandal, in which Bakker was accused of arranging a payoff to Jessica Hahn, with whom Bakker had been sexually involved. Later, accused of fraud, Bakker was tried, convicted and sent to prison.

Dovalina, who had been a newspaper editor and reporter and who was familiar with the story, eagerly agreed to the collaboration. He did some quick research and by the next day had written a very tentative first scene, the scene in which Messner confronts her life after the collapse of the Bakkers’ empire. Buck quickly came up with the song, “I Still Have Jesus.” Quickly, they arranged to have the scene performed before University of Houston theater students. The scene was a hit. Buck and Dovalina were on their way.

Buck contacted Tammy Faye’s agent, Joe Spotts, who is also a theater producer. He loved the scene and the song and greased the way for an interview with Tammy Faye in Charlotte, N.C. Tammy, with second husband Roe Messner present during the first part of the meeting, gave Dovalina and Buck an interview that lasted hours.  The questions and the answers yielded the themes of the musical and inspired the structural choices that the collaborators came up with—using three Tammy Fayes, the child, the Tammy Faye from the 1990s and present-day Tammy Faye, representing innocence, innocence lost and redemption.

By the fall of 2004, the collaborators had completed a first draft of the first act and had written some of the scenes and songs in the second act. Dovalina and Buck decided to have a staged reading. They asked their Ostrow classmate, Garrett, to direct and their friends in Houston theater to act and sing the parts. Other friends, colleagues, fellow students and a few big names in theater attended.

During the talkback, it became evident that Buck and Dovalina had something on their hands, but that the play’s themes were obscured and that the use of present-day Tammy Faye as a narrator slowed the play’s momentum.

One of the big names at the reading, the Broadway director Marshall Mason, told Buck and Dovalina that at the play’s core was Tammy Faye’s heart, her willingness to accept everybody, without judgment, a rarity in evangelical Christianity. The audience needs to understand that, he said.

The rewrites involved a new opening scene, revamping other scenes, moving scenes around, deletion of a narrator, rewriting music and lyrics and adding new musical numbers.

Though they had not finished the rewriting, Dovalina and Buck entered the play to the Cincinnati Fringe Festival. In February of this year, they received word that the musical had been selected for production in the summer. They formed their own production company.

Later, they were told that opening night, at the downtown Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati (ETC), would be June 3, Dovalina’s birthday, and just a few days before Buck’s birthday. They consider that a good omen.

Garrett will return as director, and Aaron Callies has come aboard as choreographer.

Buck, Dovalina and Garrett traveled to Cincinnati in April and began casting. But because not enough performers showed up, the group continued auditions by long-distance, examining resumes, photos and asking performers to sing on the phone.

"The Gospel" was a great succes in Cincinnati. After the festival ended, the Cincinnati Enquirer called it "a hot ticket." It was reportedly the second best attended event of the festival. 

More on Stuart Ostrow

http://www.ibdb.com/person.asp?ID=75318

http://www.theatredb.com/QPerson.php?pid=p005119