Best of the Day: Kinky Boots Opens – August 11, 2015
Welcome to Best of the Day, our daily recommendation for what to check out around town. If you do one thing in Boston today, consider this.
Kinky Boots / Courtesy photo by Matthew Murphy
If pop culture has taught us anything over the last two decades, it’s that in Jolly Olde Sexually Repressed England, when the going gets tough, the tough get pervy. Are you an out-of-work steelworker who needs to make a quick buck? Learn the art of male stripping. Is your ladies’ club trying to raise funds for a cash-strapped hospital? Pose for a nude calendar while brandishing strategically placed tea and crumpets. Is your struggling shoe factory about to go bankrupt? Ditch the loafers, team up with a drag queen, and start pumping out Bettie Page-worthy thigh-high boots instead.
But the all-important question is: Has your bashful indie film and its monocle-popping premise charmed the pants off audiences both in the UK and across the pond? Turn it into a slick Broadway musical.
On August 11, Kinky Boots—the smash-hit musical adaptation of the 2005 film of the same name—opens in Boston. Purported to have been inspired by true events, Kinky Boots is the story of unlikely bedfellows Charlie Price, the straight-laced heir of an ailing gentlemen’s shoe factory, and Lola, the drag queen who inspires Charlie to revive the business by focusing it on fine-quality fetish footwear instead. Or, as Charlie announces to his crew: “You are not making boots. You are making two and a half feet of irresistible, tubular sex.”
Thanks to a book composed by Harvey Fierstein (whose best-known works, Torch Song Trilogy and La Cage aux Folles, limn the world of drag performers) and a score by Cyndi Lauper, Kinky Boots nabbed six Tonys and a Grammy in 2013, the year it made its stage debut. Now, you can explore the Land of Lola for yourself—this touring production is at the Boston Opera House through August 30.
$44+, August 11-30, Boston Opera House, 539 Washington St., Boston, 800-982-2787, broadwayinboston.com.
