Kinky Boots

Sometimes when I go to a new Broadway musical it is so bad I don’t even know where to start in reviewing it. (This season’s Hands on a Hardbody comes to mind.) So I was thrilled to find just the opposite with Kinky Boots, the Cyndi Lauper-scored adaptation of the 2005 film with its deliciously fun performances, music, choreography, costumes and every other aspect to boot. The audience at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre was bursting with joy and laughter.

This story of Charlie (Stark Sands, left in photo), a small town British shoe manufacturer struggling to keep his family’s factory open, and Lola (Billy Porter, right), a drag queen he meets one night on a London street, was a charming, fact-based movie. I was concerned its simplicity would be overcome by too much Broadway commercialism, but no worries. Under Jerry Mitchell’s direction (and choreography), the new version is a high spirited, old time musical with just enough camp to make it shine for today.

Porter is both riotous and vulnerable as Lola, a cross-dressing nightclub singer disowned by his boxer father because he’s gay. Charlie also has father issues -- his didn’t think Charlie would be able to run the business and had planned to sell the building to a condominium developer, something Charlie finds out after his father dies unexpectedly shortly after the play begins.

Both young men have settled in London, Lola to a showbiz life of escape where “the world looked brighter six inches off the ground,” as she sings in “I’m Not My Father’s Son.” Charlie’s foray to London is less intentional and less committed; he has been coerced by his fiancee, Nicola (Celina Carvajal), who can’t get away fast enough from Northampton, their small midlands factory town.

The two are brought together one night when Lola is harassed by several men and Charlie, thinking she’s a woman, comes to her rescue. In the scuffle, Lola ends up smashing Charlie in the face with her high-heeled boot; it turns out she had been trained as a fighter by her father before being disowned and is quite capable of defending herself. She takes Charlie back to her nightclub dressing room to clean up his face and the two have a bit of a chat before parting.

That basherte encounter proves providential to both. Having learned a bit about a drag queen’s travails, that the largest size of women’s shoes don’t last long under a man’s weight, Charlie heads home to try to deal with the possibility of closing the factory that has been in his family for four generations but whose products are no longer in demand.

Then Charlie has an epiphany. Following the prompting of his sassy assistant, Lauren (Annaleigh Ashford, center), he realizes if he wants to keep the factory open and save the jobs of all the longtime employees, he’s got to create a product geared to a contemporary market, not the one being churned out since the business was founded in 1890. In an ah ha moment he remembers Lola and dares to envision a future in drag. If he can just convince Lola to relocate to the midlands for awhile to help design the new line.

Not an easy task, but once accomplished the two find they have more in common than they would have expected. This is nicely portrayed as “I’m Not My Father’s Son” becomes a duet, with Charlie sharing his sadness at not being the reflection his father wanted to see.

Naturally a story line (book by Harvey Fierstein) like this is expected to spur some splashy dance numbers and Mitchell as choreographer provides them. Porter belts and sashays around that stage, giving it the full diva. And who knew he had such killer showgirl legs? With the help of the Angels’, Lola’s backup singers from her nightclub act -- chorus boys in drag -- the designing of Price and Son’s latest line is an exuberant presentation to shake the foundation of the old company, with Lola and the Angels strutting their stuff and singing “Sex is in the Heel” and, volia, a thigh-high shiny red stiletto boot is now the future of this venerable company. No more wing-tipped men’s business shoes; it’s now “irresistible tubular sex appeal.”

Act One closes with the new product gliding down the assembly line. David Rockwell’s set enhances the festivities, looking more like a fairy tale workplace than an actual industrial site. Factory workers dance their way across those conveyor belts to celebrate and gleefully sing “Everybody Say Yeah.” It’s delightful.

Of course, if you’ve seen much old-style musical theatre, you know the happy ending of Act One will be shaken and tested in Act Two. Lola’s sexuality is challenged not just by the Neanderthal mentality of the factory workers, represented most forcefully by Don (Daniel Stewart Sherman), but finally in a confrontation between Charlie and Lola that threatens the company’s revival. Fierstein’s writing here makes it clear lessons are to be learn, but I didn’t feel preached at. The pace is too quick and the acting too strong.

No good musical comedy is complete without the happy-ever-after love angle. I’m not giving anything away in saying that will be found between Charlie and Lauren, who even though he is engaged to Nicola, sings of her love for him in a heartfelt Act One lament, “The History of Wrong Guys.”

A musical this rollicking wouldn’t be possible without spectacular lighting (Kenneth Posner), hair design (Josh Marquette) and make-up (Randy Houston Mercer).  And last but far from least are the costumes by Gregg Barnes, which are a play land of leather and glitter and COLOR. And that’s just the clothes. Wait until you see those boots prance down the Milan runway at the end as Price and Son takes the fashion world by storm. Charlie and Lola are reconciled, Charlie and Lauren together, and the audience clapping along with the pulsing beat of “Raise You Up/Just Be.” I left the theatre and walked home with the words to that song -- “When you hit the dust, let me lift you up” -- singing in my ear.