The pop icon recalls how frustrations with the music business made her more open to an offer from her Tony-winning friend.
Although Kinky Boots ran for more than 2,500 performances on Broadway and netted six Tony Awards, book writer Harvey Fierstein still believes it “closed a little prematurely” when the curtain came down in spring of 2019. So even though a symptom-less case of COVID-19 kept the Tony-winning scribe from hanging with the show’s director/choreographer Jerry Mitchell and musical mastermind Cyndi Lauper during its off-Broadway premiere at Stage 42 on Aug. 25, he couldn’t be more thrilled about his musical’s return (even if he says that isolation is “driving me f–king nuts”).
“I love off Broadway — it’s my roots,” he tells Billboard over the phone, “And I love that theater. I love how open it is – there’s no balcony to overhang and block your view and mess up the sound. You can balance the sound so well in that space. There’s not a bad seat in the house, and it has a nice airy feeling to it. It plays beautifully in this space.”
A story about the owner of a failing shoe factory (Charlie, played by Christian Douglas at Stage 42) teaming up with a drag queen (Lola, played by Callum Francis, who previously performed the role on Broadway) to save his father’s business, Kinky Boots – which opened at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre in 2013 — was based on a non-musical 2005 British film inspired by a true story. While Fierstein was already an established Broadway player with four Tonys to his name, it was new ground for Lauper, who provided Kinky Boots with its vibrating musical pulse. And for the Billboard Hot 100-topping, Grammy-winning pop singer-songwriter, the offer couldn’t have come at a better time.
“I was just fed up fighting the system,” she recalls, sitting across from Billboard in a diner-style booth in Manhattan’s chic CIVILIAN Hotel. “‘You’re not on the list,’ ‘You didn’t do this,’” she says, imitating various whiny voices from back in the day. “I was like, ‘You know what? Bite me.’” So when Fierstein reached out to his So Unusual friend, she signed on.
The musical’s culture clash dramedy gave her an opportunity to escape from the genre box that record company executives kept trying to keep her trapped inside. “[In Kinky Boots], nobody sings the same jam — so I get a chance to sing all kinds of ways, instead of singing something and having someone from the company tell me, ‘You can’t do that, you’re Cyndi Lauper! You’re supposed to sound like this!’ I could use my whole voice, and write music for all the different people in the show.”
With space to breathe on the Broadway stage, she flourished – particularly when writing the numbers for Lola. Lauper tells Billboard she envisioned Lola’s musical voice as a heady mixture of Cab Calloway and Shirley Bassey, with a sprinkle of Whitney Houston and Tina Turner, which you can hear on sly club numbers like “Sex Is in the Heel” and “Land of Lola.” Billy Porter, who originally played the role on Broadway, won a Tony for best actor in a musical with the role, and Kinky Boots gave Lauper herself a Tony for best original score – marking the first time in history a solo woman won in that category.
“The fact that there were so many different kinds of people in the show was exciting,” Lauper recalls of what made her sign on in the first place. “It was inclusive. It was more like real life.”
Looking back now, not even a decade after its Broadway premiere, Kinky Boots seems ahead of its time. Certainly, it’s an immediate precursor to drag’s cultural ascendance over the last half decade. “There’s so much misunderstanding. So many people don’t understand the difference between a drag queen and being transgender and someone with gender dysphoria. There’s so much to the human condition,” Fierstein says. “Now look at the stuff we’re aware of – even RuPaul’s Drag Race has had a heterosexual male drag queen, and a woman drag queen. And transgender drag queens. And that doesn’t make them any less drag; a drag queen is a special way people like to perform.”
