Kinky Boots

With its optimistic storyline, Cyndi Lauper songs, a universally talented cast, exuberant choreography, skilled, pacey direction from Martin Croft, and great costumes, this production of Kinky Boots delivers the audience a big warm, hooting and stomping evening.

Applause and affirmation must also go to producer James Terry and the James Terry Collective.  Yet again, Terry has assembled a big (twenty-one performers on stage) and wonderful cast, and a great-sounding band (ten musicians).  He’s found resources for fabulous costumes (all those boots!) and a clever set.  For an independent company putting all this together on an ad hoc basis is truly impressive.

Charlie Price (Christian Charisiou), lives in the shadow of his shoe manufacturer father.  He’s a guy not sure of who he is or what he wants.  Persuaded to pursue a career in real estate in London by his glamorous girlfriend Nicola (Kelsey Hale), he has a chance meeting with challenging drag queen Lola (Carl de Villa) at her seedy Soho club – and her backup drag queen dancers (Lochlan Erard, Jaydon Prelc, Cody Green and Carter Rickard).  Charlie knows shoes and he happens to notice the failings of drag queen footwear… 

Charlie’s father dies and Charlie inherits Price & Sons, the failing if staid and respectable Northampton shoe factory.  After some advice from factory worker Lauren (Jessica Faulkner) about niche markets, Charlie sees a way to save the factory and the workers’ jobs.  They’ll manufacture ‘kinky boots’ – thigh high red with enough strength in the heel to support a man’s (i.e. drag queen’s) weight. 

The casting, by the way, of the workforce at Price & Sons is excellent in its variety of performers and their talents – they all look as if they could really be workers on a factory floor and make shoes.  Their sassy choreography is by Luca Dinardo and Jordan Charles Herbert, and the multi-styled music is under the direction of Nathan Firman.

Charlie invites Lola to Northampton to design the boots.  Lola comes, with her back-up dancers, her ‘angels’, and she’s very definite about design and colour.  This in the face of the workers’ resistance plus homophobic opposition and prejudice, mainly from butch worker Don (Joseph Lizacic).  When things build to real confrontation, both Charlie and Lola (birth name ‘Simon’) discover they have more in common than they’d thought: escaping their fathers’ expectations.

The ticking clock is the launch of the boots at a fashion show in Milan in only three weeks…

Based on the 2005 movie, this musical version of Kinky Boots has had an amazing run since its premiere in 2012 (a six-year run on Broadway then around the world, gross $319 million at the box office).  Not only does it continue to tap into the glamour of drag queens and gay culture – and dramatise the demand and the struggle for acceptance – the show also references changes in manufacturing and the resulting precarity of employment, particularly in regional areas.  It’s simultaneously a fairy tale and one based in hard and recognisable reality – and the enduring theme of the search for identity.  As the lyric has it, ‘Let me be… me.’ 

If there’s a weakness here, it’s in the book, Harvey Fierstein’s adaptation of the movie. There’s not much plot and what there is, is pretty formulaic, and not too believable.  Obstacles are set-up but they (such as Nicola) melt away without too much pain.  Once Charlie meets Lola (and notices Lauren), we pretty much know what’ll happen next.  But that’s not why we’re there – and it doesn’t seem to matter.  What happens is what audiences want to happen.  Obstacles can be overcome; people can be accepted for who they are – and we’ll have a great time while we watch it all work out.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: James Terry