I saw this national tour of hit Broadway show Kinky Boots on its final performance in Rochester, New York on a Sunday evening; and the biggest surprise for me was that the mostly elderly audience reacted with the screaming enthusiasm of a younger crowd at a rock concert.
Probably the biggest revelation of the show itself is the remarkably original and effective score by Cyndi Lauper. I’ve liked Cyndi Lauper as a pop singer and delightful comic actress for decades, but no one seems to have realized – including Ms. Lauper – that she has enormous talent as a composer and lyricist for musical comedy. Her show-stopping song, “Not My Father’s Son,” performed by both the transgendered drag-queen Lola and the rebellious son and heir of the failing shoe-making factory, could become the anthem not only of sexual rebels but actually of all conflicted offspring who reject inherited expectations and pursue a path of their own. It got an ovation accompanied by grins and tears.
The plot, adapted from the charming but not especially successful British film, is both cliché and silly: the unlikely union of transvestite entertainers and bankrupt shoe-factory workers leads to the creation of the title-symbol – gaudy, red, thigh-length boots with long, scary stiletto-heels. And everyone prances around in them.
Harvey Fierstein’s plot for the musical adds a lot of LGBT propaganda and mushy sentimentality, but Jerry Mitchell’s slick direction and choreography keep it clap-trapping. A breakneck celebratory fashion show on treadmills, for instance, is circus-like entertaining. A slew of designers and technicians, headed by award-winning Broadway pros David Rockwell {scenery], Gregg Barnes [costumes], and Kenneth Posner [lighting], plus Stephen Oremus’s music supervision insure that this touring version is handsome Broadway-level entertainment. In the performance I saw, Mike Longo replaced Steven Booth as the character Charlie Price; Adam Halpin replaced Mike Longo as the character, Harry; and Jeff Kuhr replaced Adam Halpin as Richard Bailey. J. Harrison Ghee made a truly commanding, great-looking Lola in and out of drag. No doubt, this mostly-East Coast tour will include various cast-changes. But it’s a uniformly well-cast, nifty entertainment, and apparently appeals to all sorts of audiences.
