Northampton Musical Theatre Company – Kinky Boots at Royal & Derngate

Northamptonshire is a funny ol` place, not many people seemed to have heard of it & those that have don’t even know where it is. “Northamptonshire is like a wife, we love her but wouldn’t run down the pub and tell our mates” was one description I read in a book about the county. This unpretentious county of ours rarely gets the national spotlight, so I was all ears when one February afternoon in 1999 when my mum rang to let me know of a programme on BBC that night called ‘Trouble’ at the Top’. “It’s all about a shoe factory in Earls Barton, it should be interesting.” Thanks for the heads up Mum! And so began a love affair with the story of the ‘Kinky Boots’ & an appreciation of the Northamptonshire shoe industry, I had never felt when I was growing up.

‘I’m not working in a shoe factory” was my reply to the careers officer who visited our school just before us 16 year olds were due to leave for the 1970’s world of work. Shoe factories were ten a penny in Northamptonshire at the time & my home town of Irthlingborough had it’s fair share of them. 

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

Lola

The broadcaster Sir David Frost wrote in his autobiography of the time that he taught at the Irthlingborough & Finedon Secondary Modern school that all of the pupils went to work in the local shoe factory or the local pea factory (Whitworths). But it was a fate I escaped because a few months before I was due to leave school it was announced that our school would, for the first time, have a sixth form & that meant a chance for me to pursue a career in the arts.

I eventually gained a place on a Graphic design degree course at Birmingham polytechnic in 1978. I remember distinctly my first trip back home after being away for nine weeks. I’d caught the train from Birmingham to Northampton and then on to Irthlingborough. It was about 5.30pm & by the time the bus reached Earls Barton it suddenly began to smell very strongly of leather as the shoe workers piled on for their journey home. When I alighted the bus in the middle of Irthlingborough my first thought was, blimey, it smells of leather here as well!

Having grown up with the smell of leather all my life I had stopped noticing it until I had spent weeks away in a different part of the country. Another memory from my Birmingham days was being laughed at for wearing Air Wair boots, or Dr Martens as they are more commonly known by the cool students. ‘Are you a football hooligan? Er, no, I can buy a pair for 50p or any shoes come to that for a fraction of the price that you would pay for in the shops cos I know the people who make them. Imagine laughing at a student today for wearing Dr Martens boots! Such is the world of fashion!

The boot and shoe and tanning industry had begun to decline during the 1970’s & come the late 1990’s pretty much all of the tanning & mass shoe production in the county had gone by the wayside (apart from the now in fashion, Dr Martens) leaving only the high end shoemakers such as Grenson’s, Loakes, Trickers & Barker amongst others, a far cry from the time in the early 1900’s when 40% of Northamptonshire men worked making shoes.

But it was in 1999 that the Kinky boots story begins. The ”Trouble at the top’ programme featured a struggling shoe factory, ‘WJ Brookes’ and the owner of the one hundred year old family business, Steve Pateman.  People tuning in may have been lured in by the Kinky Boots title but what they saw was the heartwarming story of a boss pulling out all the stops to keep his business afloat, even to the point of sleeping on a friends sofa rather than shelling out for hotel rooms when he attempted to gain interest in his new line of boots for drag artistes & transvestites at a shoe convention in Milan.

So inspiring was Steve’s story that ‘Kinky Boots’ the movie was released in 2005 & I made a rare visit to the cinema to see it.  As with all good stories, it has received a certain amount of embellishment with retelling, mainly in the form of ‘Lola’, a Soho drag queen created as a central character.  The essence of the story is the collision of two worlds, the grey & beige world of men’s shoe manufacture in the form of the staid, conformist & unpretentious factory owner Charlie Price, the owner of Price & Son’s shoe factory in provincial Northampton & the razzle dazzle larger than life world show world of a London drag queen.

The Kinky Boots story could have ended there had it not been for an American producer, Daryl Roth who thought the film would make a great musical & in 2013 Kinky Boots the Musical opened on Broadway in New York. Now the Kinky Boots story had grown legs & gone global! It was therefore perfectly natural that at some point the story would be retold, in Northampton by Northamptonians & that moment has now arrived with a faithful reproduction of the Kinky Boots musical by the Northampton Musical Theatre Company. So it was with great pleasure that along with my wife, we got to see our favourite musical once again, the previous time being the West End  production that came on tour to Northampton in 2018.

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

Red, Red,Red!

Lola

The auditorium was filling up nicely when we arrived & drinks were ordered which for me had to be Northampton brewed Phipp’s IPA . Long standing fans of the show were evident by their sparkly dresses & fancy boots but my footwear were a very sensible pair of Rushden made Grenson Brogues. Any show that begins with the line ‘Are you going to watch the Cobblers tonight’ is a sure fire winner in my book and I resisted the urge to shout out, ‘The match was last night, it finished 2-2 and I was there!

The story unfolds in the setting of Price’s shoe factory in Northampton with Charlie Price, ably played by Dan Hodson suddenly becomes the owner of the factory with the untimely death of his father just at the point that he and Charlie’s social climbing girlfriend, Nicola (Ashleigh Standage) are about to begin a new and exciting life in London. It is on a trip to London to try to offload at cost an over supply of shoes that had built up due to his late father’s insistence of keeping the workers employed at all costs (another sub plot to the over all story) that Charlie tries to defend ‘Lola’ from a couple of thugs. In the ensuing fight, Lola breaks a heel of her boot & that’s when the story really gets going.

Lola (Luke White) and Lola’s Angels did a fantastic job of just staying on their feet in high heeled boots, let alone dance! I’m sure one or two ladies in the audience must have been quite envious of the legs of Lola and co! The choreography I thought was particularly good & the first act ended with a rousing version of my show favourite  ‘Everybody say Yeah!’ which is still my earworm as I write this piece eighteen hours later. 

The second act imbued me with the same warm glow as the original TV programme, the movie and the West End show & I particularly liked the theme of acceptance, the acceptance of people who are not like us which is a message that’s more pertinent now than even just a few years ago. The second act finished with another uplifting show tune, Raise you up/just be and the cast received a deserved standing ovation from the almost capacity audience. The cast put their heart and ‘sole’ into it and for me the whole show ‘clicked’, puns intended!

The circle of the story for me was complete when the man who’s story began the Kinky Boots phenomenon appeared on stage at the very end resplendent in his thigh high bright red kinky boots. Steve Pateman, who had made himself available all evening for selfies, took the applause alongside the whole cast & a second encore with the lead players.

As we made our way back to the car I reflected on the shoe industry, and what little regard I had for the craft & skill it took to make a fine pair of shoes back in the day when a job in the shoe industry was suggested to me. Nowadays days I feel a sense of pride in our shoe making heritage & it’s personification in all forms of the Kinky Boots story.

Last year I was admiring some of Northamptonshire’s finest brands in a York shoe shop. The owner was just opening up & enquired if I would like to come into the shop & purchase some shoes, No, it’s ok, I come from Northamptonshire & I can get them from the factory shops. ‘Ah, he said, Northamptonshire, that’s gods country that is.  Well, yeah, it is but I wouldn’t go down the pub and tell everyone. 

Review written by Mark Pacan for The Travel Locker Press Team

Pics by Oscar Myles – Photographer