My Review of KINKY BOOTS in the November 2017 issue of ICON Magazine
The Tony award-winning musical found its way to the academy of Music last month. With music and lyrics by the legendary Cyndi Lauper, this story of a drag queen named Lola (Jos N Banks) who saves an old English shoe factory with her redesign of the ordinary boot into high camp fashion accessory with stiletto heels, was a lukewarm success. The impeccable, albeit mechanistic, singing and dancing scored high,but forget trying to follow what the people on stage were saying. The actors’ lines were recited too quickly and occasionally rendered incomprehensible, because talking fast with a thick English accent is a recipe for gibberish. Most of Lauper’s music also failed to catch fire, with the finale “Raise you up” the notable exception. Coming at the end ofthe show, “Raise you up” was too little too late as most of the music had a generic Broadway sound that made Kinky Boots sound like a million other Great White Way hits. The storyline is also somewhat dated: Lola, the heterosexual transvestite drag queen, asks the macho factory workers for acceptance and tolerance and in so doing she raises the question: what is a man? The message here is that a man is anything you want a man to be: a drag queen in flashy red sequined boots or an uptight heterosexual whiteman, like Charlie (Lance Bordelon), the factory owner’s son who has two women in love with him. Why all this seemed more powerfully relevant years ago probably has something to do with the speed at which cultural change travels.