Kinky Boots     Broadway Review based on performance 03/31/13


Can you believe, as do the workers in the Northampton, England shoe factory Price & Son, that a shoe is (as the opening number exuberantly proclaims) "The Most Beautiful Thing in the World"? Then there is no doubt that you will enjoy seeing all of the other beautiful things on the stage of the Al Hirschfield Theatre.

Any resemblance of the new musical Kinky Boots to the 2005 film comedy of the same name is purely intentional, but it is also almost irrelevant. There is little doubt that the intention of the collaborators, Cyndi Lauper, who wrote the music and lyrics and Harvey Fierstein, who wrote the book, was to improve on their source material.And they have done it exceedingly well.

Based on a true story, the British film comedy evidently did not please the majority of critics nor did it do too well as the box-office. It did, however, nurture a cult following not unlike the film Once that was turned into the award-winning hit musical currently on Broadway. Kinky Boots has similarly been resuscitated and revitalized into a terrifically entertaining musical with plenty of heart as well as with a plethora of heels by its collaborators. A significant adjunct to their success is Jerry Mitchell, whose perceptive direction and inventive choreography are a key component to this musical's success.

In Kinky Boots we recognize issues about the struggle many have to being open-mined and tolerant to the many facets of sexual preference and diversity explored in La Cage Aux Folles, and the predominantly juke-box musical Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. The Kinky Boots team is to be commended for this more modestly but no less affably conceived creation .

Set designer David Rockwell has framed the musical with a responsive unit set filled with moving parts, bells and whistles that serves the story within it. There is no room for modesty, however, in the flashy and, indeed, wonderfully kinky creations designed for the drag queens by designer Gregg Barnes.

This vibrant and enjoyable musical not only has more memorable performances but also more muscle than did the film (notwithstanding the sturdy calves that dance and parade about) about a drag queen who turns around the fortunes of a long-established but failing shoe factory.

The fortunes of this musical ultimately reside to a large extent in the astonishingly sophisticated and melodic score composed by rock music genre's most adorable (my opinion) star. Lauper's songs pulsate with a gratifyingly empowerment through Fierstein's heart-warming, but also humorously gritty book. Lauper is making her Broadway debut as composer but also as a lyricist and many of the lyrics reveal her affinity for the poetic illusion. (see quote above).

Kinky Boots boasts a central diva-styled role that comes direct from the revered here-I-am-boys school of performing. There is little doubt from the time we meet the one-of-kind Lola, as played with a refreshingly pugnacious perspicacity by a sensational Billy Porter, that whatever Lola wants, she is likely to get. But it has to be with the help of Charlie (Stark Sands), the factory's young and insecure owner. As the inheritor of his recently deceased father's long-established but now failing business, Sands is not only an engaging and splendid singer and actor but he also strikes a nice balance of power in the light of Porter's obligatory flamboyance. But as we see in Kinky Boots, not all drag queens are alike.

Lola gives us a particularly poignant perspective of a man who has found his niche. We see him as ten-year-old Simon (Marquise Neal) who would rather put on his mother's red high-heeled shoes than become the tough, manly prize-fighter that his father is training him to be. Putting on the shoes, the talented young Mr. Neal belts a short refrain from "The Most Beautiful Thing" out of the park.

Motivated by Lola, who has gives up her job performing in a London club, The Blue Angel, to become his designer, Charlie has to not only deal with the disintegrating relationship with his self-centered and unsupportive fiancée Nicola (Celina Carvajal) who wants Charlie to sell the business and move with her to London, but also with the anxiety of the workers who worry that their jobs are at stake.

Standouts among them are Lauren, who, as played by a delightfully idiosyncratic Annaleigh Ashford and Don (a super performance by Daniel Stewart Sherman) as the bearish homophobe who challenges Lola to a fight at the local Fisticuff's Bar. This cleverly devised, if also somewhat silly scene, is played within a ring and serves as a cap, as well as a surprise, after we have seen the young Lola/Simon practicing his sparring earlier in the show.

The bevy of queens, known at the Angels, dress up the stage as characters, and also tear it up as they dig in those heels as a dynamic dancing Greek chorus. The scene in which the haut-couture-d Angels make a visit to the factory and assure the workers that they have something to strive for is a dancing highlight as part of it is performed on conveyor belts, as exciting as the song that drives it, "Sex is in the Heel." "What a Woman Wants," a particularly funny song for them in Act II, in which they challenge the men's ideas about masculinity is another show-stopping winner.

Although it does seem to come out of the blue,the musical's biggest dramatic jolt involves Charlie's change in attitude toward Lola, a change that will undergo some convolutions in regard to accepting each other for who they are. The one song that affects us deeply and emotionally is "I'm Not My Father's Son." It gives us an insight into Charlie's attempt to disassociate himself from his father's legacy, as it also, through its dual musical narrative, considers the torment behind Lola's decision to stand up and be his own man.

But be assured that all will be resolved to everyone's satisfaction by the time the factory's collection of high fetish-fashioned boots hit the runway in Milan for a finale with an a obligatory rousing number, "Raise You Up/Just Be." It's designated to make you cheer. And you will.

Lauper and Feinstein have proven themselves fortuitously formidable partners who have found a formula that has transformed a so-what film into a so-fine musical.

The Winter's Tale

McCarter Theatre, Princeton, NJ  Review based on performance April 5, 2013

So who knew that Bohemia was a playground for huge rainbow-hued butterflies? And who could suspect that the simple and celebratory-minded country-folk who also frolic there among their sheep would look like exiles from Dogpatch. Even the pretty blonde ingenue, oops I mean shepherdess, looks as if she were kin to Daisy Mae. But I'm rushing the plot a bit as things start off a lot less colorfully and, indeed, more dourly in the neutral palate palace in Sicilia where begins Director Rebecca Taichman's visionary staging of William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.

Anyone familiar with Taichman's beautifully conceptualized, wondrously clever even coy direction of Sleeping Beauty Awakes, and Twelfth Night" for the McCarter Theatre as well as with her memorable 2010 Off Broadway direction of Orlando, will also admire her adventurous approach to a play that many have considered as one of the Bard's lesser works.

Let's dispel that notion of it being lesser, despite the judicious pruning of the text and the elimination of minor characters, in the light of Taichman's magical treatment of the convoluted, preposterous plot with its essentially unmotivated exposition. Seen from her surreal perspective and through the unaffected but dramatically taut acting of her company, immersion into the plot isn't all that difficult. A significant part of the immersion is due to designer Christopher Akerlind's mood-enhancing lighting, especially a spectacularly lighted finale that is not to die for but to live for.

Shakespeare reveals his melodramatic hand early on. To be sure, there is more behavioral idiocy than psychological profundity in the story. What is profoundly chilling is the performance by Mark Harelik as Leontes the king of Sicilia, who suddenly goes mad with jealousy because he suspects and then accuses, for no more reason than a smile and an affectionate touch, the visibly very pregnant Queen Hermione of having had an affair with Polixenes, their house guest, his best friend, the king of Bohemia. A brilliant directorial touch is letting us see what Leontes imagines he is seeing in a series of freeze frames involving Hermione and Polixenes. We may surmise, as Shakespeare did, that even best friends can overstay their welcome.

Paradoxically, after the play's first half in which we see how a distressingly paranoid monarch wittingly slanders, humiliates, alienates, and even destroys most everyone he holds dear, we are treated to a second half all bathed in a sweetly sheep-shearing light, and resolved to making everyone live happily ever after. Perhaps, not one of Shakespeare's greatest hits, but this The Winter's Tale makes up for its lack of coherence and cohesiveness in its inexplicable ability to entertain.

Taichman intrigues and entertains us with a production that starts off like a modern-dress concert-staging with some of the actors attending admirably and without affectation to the text's rushes of exquisite lyricism while those not involved sit in chairs in the back of designer Christine Jones's starkly handsome unit setting that serves in Sicilia as a spacious uncluttered palace room and as a meadow in Bohemia.

The spin that Taichman puts on her modernist approach is seen in the joyous behavior of the residents of Bohemia, whose faces we recognize belonging to the characters in Sicilia. It's a lark to see six of the nine actors suddenly show up romancing and romping about in designer David Zinn's loopy costumes in a setting whose primary reference to the pastoral is limited to a large painting of a green meadow and some cardboard cut-outs of sheep. For our added pleasure, a trio of drunken musicians and the assembled shepherds and shepherdesses engage in the obligatory merry dance.

Although it is hard to forgive Leontes for his mindless, impetuous stupidity, the character comes back to haunt us. The difficult-to-swallow redemption of Leontes presents a challenge that Harelik eventually meets. But until this happens late in the play, we see him take his rage to an extreme, throwing his body on the floor in a convulsive fit of laughter after being refuted by the Oracle. What a dramatic turnabout for Harelik who, in the midst of all his anguish, is also assigned to delight us with some delectable scenery-chewing in the role of Autolycus, a roguish, one-eyed thief and ballad-monger.

Sean Arbuckle is excellent as the gallant but maligned Polixenes, as is Brent Carver, as Leonte's trusted counselor Camillo. Getting her say is Nancy Robinette as Paula, the court loudmouth and as a drunken Shepardess. So does theater veteran Ted van Griethuysen, as Paulina's husband. Hannah Yelland's display of patience-in-adversity as that "precious creature" Hermione is heart-breaking. Heather Wood as the long-lost daughter Perdita, and Todd Bartels as the a-wooing Prince Florizel are atypically disarming the lovesick teens.

With its romantic innocence tainted by morbid undertones and its gorgeous poetry tested by melodramatic excess, "The Winter's Tale" makes uncompromised appreciation difficult. However, Taichman's ability to give us "The Winter's Tale" with equal parts chills and charms is sure to win fans. There will likely be additional fans for this fantastical tale about the healing power of love as it has been so beautifully produced by McCarter in association with The Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. where it will move following this engagement.

The Winter's Tale - Opened 04/05/13 Ends 04/21/13