Kinky Boots – A good pair of boots is worth walking for!

Kinky Boots, the heart-warming British `feel good` story set in Northamptonshire has returned home, showing at the Royal & Derngate until Saturday 6 October. With songs by Grammy® and Tony® winning pop icon Cyndi Lauper the show was a sensational success and had my complete focus from start to finish. Inspiring, hilarious, funny, glamorous, glitzy, dazzling,  heart – breaking, emotive, passionate, this musical has it all. No surprise that it has won numerous awards in Britain, the United States and the across the world.

Inspired by true events, Kinky Boots takes you from a gentlemen’s shoe factory in Northampton to the glamorous catwalks of Milan. Having struggled to live up to his father’s hopes and dreams Charlie attempts to save the family shoe factory, Price & Son, after his father dies.

If you can’t get women to wear them, you`ll never get a man like me to wear them!

Lola

It was cool to see Charlie donning the claret and white of a Cobblers Northampton Town FC football shirt. The set designs were impressive, the exterior and interior of the shoe factory, based on the Trickers shoe factory on St Michael’s Rd, Northampton. Conveyor belts, sewing machines and leather cutting tools create a convincing shoe factory.

The scenes easily switched between factory, pub, club, fight ring and catwalk seamlessly. Not even an unscheduled twenty minute `fire alarm` break, when all theatre personnel, cast and audience were forced to venture out into the cold autumn air, could dampen the enthusiasm and anticipation for what was to follow.

While on a business trip to London to sell the company’s surplus stock, Charlie intervenes to help a woman being hassled by a couple of drunks and is inadvertently knocked out by her! Charlie wakes up backstage, in the dressing room of Lola, a drag queen performer and the alter ego of Simon from Clacton. Charlie is intrigued when he sees that drag queens’ high heels snap easily because they wear women’s shoes, rather than those that can support the weight of a large man.

Back in Northampton, during the process of laying off his workers, one employee, Lauren, gives Charlie the idea of looking for a niche market product to save his business. Charlie then recruits Lauren to assist him in designing a high-heeled boot for drag performers. Their designs are met with ridicule by Lola, so she is taken on as a design consultant.

Callum Francis, who starred as Lola during the Australian tour of Kinky Boots was a tour de force, a fine vocal performance and magnetic visual appeal. The Angels tore the place down with some incredible acrobatic dance choreography and simply stunning costume design.

Whenever Lola appeared on stage eyes were drawn to her, a powerful figure of self – confidence, certainty and belief in who she was. When she was stripped down in civvies as Simon  from Clacton the change in personality and confidence was astounding. Lola had lost all conviction and belief in herself and appeared vulnerable and exposed. When she and Charlie sang `Not my father’s son` you could feel the compassion and empathy for each character from a now subdued audience.

Burgundy- please God tell me I have not inspired something Burgundy!

Red, Red,Red!

Lola

Some of the male employees are uncomfortable with Lola’s presence particularly a chauvinistic male worker called Don. Charlie’s fiancée insists that he sell the company, but Charlie is determined to save it and the jobs of his employees. Charlie is invited to showcase the new boots in Milan; the strain he puts on his workers encourages most of them, including Lola, to walk out. The conversation is overheard by Don who unites the workers to make the boots in time for Milan.

In Milan, Charlie is forced to go onstage and model the boots himself. After tripping and falling flat on his face before Lola and her Angels arrive, putting on a spectacular final catwalk show to rapturous applause.

There were a couple of changes from the film, the arm wrestling becoming a slow-motion boxing bout. The set design and lighting during the boxing match was perfectly synchronised clearly demonstrating the divisions between the two camps of masculinity and feminism during a suitably stirring song, ` In this corner`. Colourful, dynamic and convincing musical theatre at its best! Demitri Lampra was a very convincing and believable Don, a character you get to warm to as the show goes on particularly after the boxing bout and Charlies argument with his girlfriend Nicola, when Don discovers Charlies genuine concern for his workforce. Not quite sure whether anyone managed to nail down the elusive Northamptonshire accent though!

Lola and her Angels simply stole the show. The other characters, as good as they were, almost became relegated as extras and subsidiary compared to the spectacle of Lola and her `girls`in my opinion!

Other notable performances came from Joel Harper Jackson, as Charlie, a much more animated and expressive character, than in the film version.! This was perfectly expressed during his angry response to the factory workers when preparing the boots for the Milan show.

Former Coronation Street star Paula Lane as Lauren also grabbed my attention with her amusing vocal rendition of ` The History of the wrong guys`. There were plenty of laughs throughout the performance, `What a woman wants` a song about the sexual stereotyping provided the perfect platform for the chauvinistic factory worker Don to have his beliefs shot down by Lola and the rest of the female workforce during an amusing interlude of exchanges.

The finale at the Milan Show was a fitting final climax to a stunning musical giving the whole company the opportunity to, put on their dancing shoes, not forgetting their boots, throw back their heels and raise their voices for one last rousing song of `Raise you up`,

Kinky Boots is a musical of hope, that people can respect and accept others for what they are without discrimination and judgement. It is an up – lifting celebration of diversity and friendships. Everyone leaving the auditorium had a huge smile or grin on their faces talking rapidly about what they had just seen. The standing ovation was no surprise! A show full of sole, performed at a blistering pace with everyone’s best foot forward. There’s no business-like shoe business!

Kinky Boots continues to strut the Derngate cat walk until Saturday 6 October. Tickets are selling fast and are priced from £16 to £55.50* and can be booked by calling Box Office on 01604 624811 or online at www.royalandderngate.co.uk.

Royal & Derngate
19-21 Guildhall Rd
Northampton
NN1 1DP

Box Office: 01604 624811

BoxOffice@royalandderngate.co.uk

Note:

Photograph of Lola by Darren Bell

Not all photographs are mine. If you would like credit for your photograph please let me know ASAP. Thank You