It’s probably damning Kinky Boots with faint praise to say that it’s one of the better recent-ish musicals adapted from recent-ish films. It might also raise your expectations slightly too far. The 2005 movie about a man who saves his late father’s ailing shoe factory by manufacturing a range of outrageous stiletto boots for drag queens has a lot of very obvious song cues, and they’re duly ticked off in Harvey Fierstein and Cyndi Lauper‘s very obvious adaptation. The good news is that unlike, say, Legally Blond, not all of this show feels like it’s been written on autopilot. The bad news is that the parts that do are nearly all in the first twenty minutes.
Once you’ve sat through those first twenty minutes of not-very-interesting exposition, the show kicks up several notches with the entrance of Lola, the fabulous drag queen who inspires Charlie-the-owner-of-the-shoe-factory-that’s-going-down-the-toilet to shift production towards a new demographic. Cyndi Lauper, making her debut as a composer of musicals, has great fun with Lola’s material, the big production numbers are choreographed to the hilt by Jerry Mitchell, and Callum Francis’s Lola is one of those great big star turns you’ll be talking about all the way home.
The trouble is, next to Lola everything else looks a little bit drab. This touring cast features very strong performances from Joel Harper-Jackson as Charlie, from Adam Price as factory foreman George, from Demitri Lampra as Don, the unreconstructed bigot who clashes with Lola on the factory floor and learns a big lesson as a result, and especially from Paula Lane as Lauren, the factory worker with a secret crush on her boss, but only ‘The History of Wrong Guys’, Lauren’s showstopping diatribe about her tendency to fall for inappropriate men, has as much impact as Lola’s big production numbers.
None of it – after the first twenty minutes, anyway – is bad which is to say that the production is excecuted with a great deal of professional competence. Jerry Mitchell’s staging is impressively slick, David Rockwell’s set moves efficiently from a factory in Northampton to a drag club in London to a catwalk in Milan, Kenneth Posner’s lighting is riotously dazzling when it needs to be, and the ensemble is full of sharp, funny performances in the minor roles. You’ll have a good time. You may not want to compare Harvey Fierstein’s stage script too closely with Tim Firth and Jeff Deane’s screenplay for the film, though, because Fierstein’s adaptation is sometimes numbingly simplistic. Nearly all of the nuance is gone from the relationship between Charlie and Lola, to the point where the plot simply doesn’t make sense: in the film, Charlie doesn’t entirely overcome his prejudices until the very end, whereas Fierstein has Charlie accepting Lola for who he is from the beginning and then berating Lola for not being properly masculine halfway through Act Two. Nicola, Charlie’s upwardly-mobile fiancée, is reduced to a boo-hiss villain. Fierstein almost completely glosses over the question of Lola’s sexuality, allowing the audience to draw their own conclusions; the screenplay makes Lola/Simon unequivocally straight, which is a far more interesting choice in terms of confronting the audience’s preconceptions about drag performers. Throughout, the musical replaces nearly all of the film’s grit with glitter, and the film didn’t have that much grit to begin with. The result is a show that is great fun, at least once you’ve sat through those first twenty minutes, but which could have been a great deal more than that.
Callum Francis’s star turn as Lola, though, is something to see. He’s the real thing: a fabulous singer, superb comic timing, star presence, and he manages to put back a lot of the emotional heft Harvey Fierstein has so carefully filleted out of the book. He’s more than worth the cost of the ticket, and the show offers a thoroughly entertaining night out as long as you don’t think too hard about what you’re watching. You do, at least, get some sense of what attracted the show’s creators to this source material – again, unlike Legally Blonde – and while it’s a pity that sense of inspiration (very) obviously did not extend to every character or every element of the plot, Lola’s numbers are good enough that they more than compensate for the deficiencies in the writing elsewhere. Don’t go expecting a “great musical”, though. Whenever Francis is onstage, this is great entertainment – but that’s all.
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