One of the best and most persistent Broadway musicals of the last couple decades—there hasn’t been an overwhelming number—is now off-Broadway. Kinky Boots, Cyndi Lauper’s (primarily) rock score and Harvey Fierstein’s book, directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell—is at Stage 42. That’s the theater where the Shubert’s Gerald Schoenfeld, supervising the design, stipulated it must have a Broadway-comparable stage.
So, what you see off-Broadway is what you got on. There’s no noticeable shrinkage of elements to chamber-musical scale, including, thanks be, David Rockwell’s set of a Northumberland, England shoe factory. (There does seem to be the disappearance of a minor character; the list of producers is also about the same as before.)
With Marcus Neville as shoe-factory foreman George the only opening-night-cast holdover, the new members are right up to original-cast level and perhaps even more so. Notably, they’re led by Callum Francis as drag queen/new kinky-boots designer Lola and Christian Douglas as the reluctant heir to a failing business.
Otherwise, this reviewer’s response to the revived popular property is almost exactly what it was as of the April 4, 2013 first night. What I said then I say now of a show in which an exuberant drag queen helps a perplexed young factory owner introduce a line of cross-dressing boots. Therefore, I quote some excerpts from my initial review:
“If Kinky Boots were judged solely on the merits of its several uproarious numbers and sunspot-bright performances, it would be accounted a runaway hit — and many happy patrons will do just that. Show-biz truth is that any production boasting both a knock-out first-act and second-act finale can’t go wrong.
“Indeed, when the cast members are singing composer-lyricist Cyndi Lauper’s show-closing “Raise You Up” (has there ever been a more blatant demand for a standing ovation?), they’re also describing the effect they’ve been having on the audience for the length of the enterprise.
“Adapting the 2005 Geoff Deane-Tim Firth movie of the same title, Fierstein brings the empathy he’s exhibited for gay men since Torch Song Trilogy. But he gets into trouble with a plot line that by the intermission looks as if everything kinky-boots-wise is about to turn out fine. Confronted with a second act, he detours into complications for supporting characters.”
That’s what I said then and maintain now, since I’m having similar reactions to the shelter-skelter second-act plot delvings and to Lauper’s accompanying work. When people discuss Broadway belters and Broadway belting, they likely might bring up Kinky Boots as a foremost example. The belting and amplification of it here is occasionally tantamount to aural masochism.
So much so that too often lyrics are obscured. This means that some of Lauper’s confusing lyrics can‘t be heard. (Not necessarily a bad thing.) For instance, at a crucial late second-act moment Charlie has a power anthem called “The Soul of a Man.” Many of the words were lost on me, but Douglas’s impassioned delivery turns it into a mesmerizing emotional turn. Francis, often with Lola’s six-strong Angels coterie, supplies the same force more than once — and usually garbed in costumer Gregg Barnes’ most outlandish get-ups.
Lauper does push some of the louder stops in at one impressive time — for the Lola-Charlie duet, “I’m Not My Father’s Son.” It may be there are other male duets in musical-theater annals that reckon with the subject. If so, I don’t know it or them. Lauper’s may be the only time when a lyricist—a woman, at that — writes so movingly, so hauntingly about men who haven’t grown up to be the men their father wanted them to be. Lauper’s understanding of the unfortunately wide-spread, truly relatable, often devastating dilemma is praise-worthy.
Kinky Boots has many messages to impart, messages that Fierstein has decidedly sent throughout his career (cf. Torch Song Trilogy as well as La Cage Aux Folles). This time it’s encapsulated in Lola’s dictum, “Accept someone for who they are.” Though grammatically awkward and, granted, heard elsewhere and elsewhere and elsewhere before in our crazed era, it still has weight. Indeed, it might be more audience-rousing during these woke 2022 days when the headlines are full of people – yoo-hoo, Governor DeSantis, Supreme Court Justice Thomas – who get on their doddering high horses about the importance of not accepting people as they are.
So there you have it. Kinky Boots doesn’t necessarily call for suspension of disbelief – only some suspension of the most exacting critical standards. That’s how eager, entertainment-loving customers will get — and are getting — a great, big boot out of it. Make that a great, big, glittering kinky boot.
Kinky Boots opened August 25, 2022, at Stage 42. Tickets and information: kinkybootsthemusical.com
