KINKY BOOTS: CHARLIE AND THE SHOE FACTORY By Peter Filichia
Let’s talk a little about Charlie.
Usually when people discuss KINKY BOOTS, they center on Lola, the unapologetic, out-there, fully actualized drag queen. And how can they not? The bigger-than-life Lola not only brings to mind a lyric from DAMN YANKEES – “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets” – but also one from WILDCAT – “Hey, look out, world, here I come!” CABARET gets in there, too, for even before Lola defiantly says midway through the first act, “I do the opposite of what people want me to do,” audiences have already realized that she was the 21st-century Sally Bowles.
Lola won a Best Actor in a Musical Tony for Billy Porter, who saw his Broadway drought of more than a dozen years come to a quick end. That famous F. Scott Fitzgerald line that “there are no second acts in American lives” was once again proved wrong as Porter has since skyrocketed to household-name status.
Not only has Porter had a strong second life, but so has KINKY BOOTS. So much for what Charlie’s chum Harry says in “Take What You Got,” that “you can’t make it last.” KINKY BOOTS has indeed lasted. You’d never think that a Broadway musical that ran six years and closed as recently as 2019 would be revived only 39 months later. But here it is at Stage 42.
Now that we’ve had another chance to see it, let’s center on Charlie Price.
Nothing against Callum Francis, the current Lola who excels in every way. Nothing is meant to suggest that Stark Sands, who originated Charlie, is even a whit inferior to Christian Douglas in the current revival; Sands was just as accomplished.
That said, in any show where there are two leads – with one a drag queen and one who isn’t – who do you think is going to get all the attention?
Thirty-nine years ago this week, LA CAGE AUX FOLLES opened (not so coincidentally, with a book by KINKY’s librettist Harvey Fierstein). George Hearn was the drag queen and Gene Barry was the man of the house. Each, like the leads in KINKY, received Best Actor in a Musical Tony nomination, but was there ever any doubt that Hearn, not Barry, would win the prize – just as Porter did against Sands?
As admirable as Lola is, Charlie turns out to be worthy in a different way – although that isn’t obvious from the outset. In Cyndi Lauper’s excellent opening number, Charlie shows that he doesn’t agree with his father – the fourth-generation owner of the Price and Son factory – that each shoe they make is “The Most Beautiful Thing in the World.”
If Charlie is forced to be the fifth-generation owner, he may be driven to drink a fifth each night. Charlie just might wear out his own shoe leather while running away from the family business.
His fiancée Nicola will be happy to sprint right along with him, for she’s ready to say a not-so-fond farewell to their native Northampton in favor of exciting London. If Nicola heard Tessie O’Shea sing “London Is a Little Bit of All Right” in THE GIRL WHO CAME TO SUPPER, she’d undoubtedly feel that the Tony winner was greatly underselling the city.
(Never mentioned is that once they’re in London, Charlie and Nicola would be able to see all those West End plays and musicals. That must have been an oversight on the writers’ part.)
Turns out that Nicola loves shoes as much as Charlie’s dad, albeit in a markedly different way. Nothing from staid ol’ Prince and Son can do it for her, but give her Jimmy Choos and hear her give out with “Whooos!” Brand and stature must be represented for her to see a shoe as “the most beautiful thing in the world.”
Then Charlie’s father unexpectedly dies. The son can now close the factory and move on, but his concern for the long-employed staff won’t allow it. Here’s where Charlie shows his considerable mettle, because he’s concerned about his father’s employees who have deeply depended on their jobs; finding other employment in on-the-way-down Northampton would be next to impossible. So, Charlie wants the business to flourish less for him than for them.
Can he? Although Charlie does sing a few lines in the first two numbers, he doesn’t fully come to musical life until KINKY’s fourth and fifth songs – and not until he’s met Lola, who complains about high heels that just can’t take a man’s weight. In “Charley’s Soliloquy,” he wonders if he’s up to the challenge: “Know what I’m doing, or am I a fraud? Do I fit in? Where do I begin? Same old Charlie, frightened and flawed,” he sings in Lauper’s introspective lyrics.
Then, in “Step One,” Lauper comes up with a beauty as Charlie sings, “I may be the hero who reinvents the heel!” Sands and now Douglas sing it with the excitement that some Egyptian must have felt in 1550 B.C. when (s)he invented the shoe.
Nicola, meanwhile, is only concerned about herself. Charlie’s plea – “We’ve grown up with these people! We’ve known them all our lives!” – means nothing to his childhood sweetheart. This is long before he realizes that staying with her because of longevity is childish. Break it off, Charlie! A man who possesses great empathy shouldn’t be with a woman who doesn’t have a smidgen of sympathy.
Besides, can’t you see that the right woman for you is right there in the factory? We feel for Lauren when she details “The History of Wrong Guys” that she’s endured. Charlie can rescue this employee in more ways than one.
So, Charlie and Lola will become business partners in the endeavor to find that elusive heel. Now not all partners partake in friendship; Rodgers and Hammerstein, we’re told, were hardly bosom buddies. Charlie and Lola may not be, but they do bond in “Not My Father’s Son,” Lauper’s introspective song in which each partner tells how he disappointed his father. (Here’s betting that many men in the audience can relate to this one …)
When the first thigh-length boots come off the stand (see logo), the audience at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre applauded even before Charlie could triumphantly describe them as “two and a half-feet of irresistible tubular sex.” History is now repeating itself at Stage 42.
Not that Charlie is flawless. As time goes on, he does lose his cool, and almost loses Lola. In “Soul of a Man,” Lauper makes him feel as low as the sole of a shoe.
But just as LA CAGE made matters turn out well, so does KINKY BOOTS. It culminates in the two-songs-for-the-price-of one finale billed as “Raise You Up/Just Be.” In the former, Charlie sings, “Now I stand up for myself!” – all the more impressive, given that he’s doing it in heels.
In the latter song, Charlie and the cast tell us “just be what you want to be. Never let them tell you who you ought to be.” During this number at a recent performance, Sean Steele, playing a factory worker, did the familiar gesture of raising his arms high over his head and clapping in rhythm so that the audience would obey. Actually, Steele needn’t have bothered, for so many were doing before he gave the signal.
Raising his arms high in victory was indeed Callum Francis, but just as high was Christian Douglas as Charlie. This time, we noticed.
Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com. His new book The Book of Broadway Musical Debates, Disputes and Disagreements can now be pre-ordered at Amazon.
