"Kinky Boots" at Al Hirschfeld Theatre, Wednesday, July 17th, Reviewed
we’ll have a gay old time!
There are many things we need in life but being lectured about Gay rights in a musical in 2013 sure ain’t one. And it is deep into the second act of the Harvey Fienstein (Book) and Cyndi Lauper (Music And Lyric) five Tony Award winning “Kinky Boots” that the platitudes come flying at you, you can run, you can duck, but you sure can’t hide and though the Broadway Musical pulls itself together for the grand finale, it is rough going for awhile.
“Kinky Boots”, based on an obscure English movie, is the story of how Charlie (Stark Sands) the son in “Price And Son” , a shoe manufacturing company, inherited his father’s business and came up with a plan to save the factory by making quality male high heels for cross dressers, after meeting drag queen Lola, a Tony winning for Best Actor in a musical, Billy Porter. Two and half hours later Harvey offers the wisdom of the ages: “You change the world when you change yourself”. A dire aphorism which suggest change is necessarily good. What if you loved gay people and now wanted to kill em?
The stage in the first and half of the second act is a smart assembly line factory… but that doesn’t make it any less of a assembly line factory. What works is the blood red boots in comparison to the green and gray factory but still it is a dowdy visage (that won a Tony while the vastly superior costume design didn’t win a Tony).
The first act is dynamite: it moves quickly through the backstory, till Charlie, who has just moved to London with his fiancee, saves a damsel who isn’t a damsel in distress and thereby meets Lola. Charlie’s forced to return to Nottingham and save the factory after his father dies, where he decides to make boots instead of the increasingly unsuccessful shoes line. Three of Lauper’s best songs take the first act from the middle to the edge of the curtain: “”Step One”, “Sex Is In The Heel” and especially a showstopping “The History Of Wrong Guys” -maybe the most Lauper song of the lot. Annaleigh Ashford does herself nothing but favors on this very fun number as she falls for Charlie. It is the best song on the album (indeed, neither “Step One” nor “Sex Is In The Heel” are as good outside of Al Hirschfeld, only “Wrong Guy” still works).
Then the second act gets bogged down in manufacturing, gay and daddy issues. The two big numbers, one for Charlie and one for Lola, are both terrible. The audience loves em but the audience are being manipulated. Coming one after another, it is hard to decide which is worse. Both are lousy big ballads, both make “Time After Time” sound like “Born To Run”. Loud, anti-melodious, bombastic, bang you over the head. And the messages start coming faster and faster. Luckily, all outstanding problems are bottled up and put to bed in time for an awesome kick up your heels with the drag queens and the factory workers together at a Milan trade show on the cat walk.
The acting is all good, all of it. Billy Porter was certainly good enough to deserve a Tony, so was Stark Sands whose white bread “oh Brad, oh dammit’ turns just dark enough towards the end. My personal fave is Annaleigh Ashford, a very funny comedienne.
The costume design, the kinky boots themselves, are just completely fabulous. Harvey Fienstein’s book is very good, it is tight enough, and moves well enough. A strange mix of “Billy Elliott” and “The Rocky Horror Show” with “La Cage Aux Folles” for, er kicks, and some completely unique flavor. Harvey just didn’t need the soap box so much. One way another, if you are gonna see “Kinky Boots” on Broadway, you don’t need any “Torch Song Trilogy” -izing. Lauper’s music and lyric are both very good, and some times not so good, and sometimes more than very good.
No, “Kinky Boots” is not a masterpiece, but it is a smart, tuneful and decent piece of Musical Theatre. It deserves its awards.
Grade: A-
Charlie And Lola
