Kinky Boots is the Musical for Generation Drag Race

IT WAS a particularly interesting experience, sitting in the Adelphi theatre recently, as I looked around at my fellow theatre-goers. For a show that stars not one, not two, but six professional drag queens, plus a muscled black man in full drag leading them, made up to the nines with more sequins and rhinestones that could ever be wished for, it was refreshing and surprising to see the sort of variety the show had attracted.

Of course, there were the attendees you’d expect to be there – theatre kids, back in the cheap seats, mouthing every lyric by heart, young professionals seeking refuge from office life – but it was most thrilling to see generations of families attending. Elderly grandmothers and grandfathers bopped in their seats to the pulsing anthemic music of the production, watching in transfixed glee as a particularly nimble queen performed an immaculate backflip in nine-inch platform stilettos, miraculously keeping her wig fully intact in the process.

Lola and her Queens perform

The stage musical Kinky Boots, based on the 2005 film of the same name, has proved to be a huge global success, and at the West End in particular. It’s easy to see why. Where the film original maintained a fairly serious tone throughout, the Jerry Mitchell directed stage show has kept just enough of that sentiment and injected the rest with a kind of balls-to-the-wall comic ferocity that will leave your endorphin levels sky-high.

The story revolves around Charlie Price, played on the night by Jordan Fox, the small-town heir of a shoe factory, who inherits the business when his father suddenly passes away. Lumped with the responsibility of keeping a factory full of staff employed with no income whatsoever, a chance encounter with a charismatic drag queen called Lola, played by Simon-Anthony Rhoden, ignites an idea within Charlie to begin catering specifically to the niche market of sturdy, durable high-heeled boots for drag queens.

The cast of Kinky Boots

Perhaps even better than it was depicted in the film, the obvious juxtaposition of straight-laced Charlie Price and the ever-fabulous Lola is exploited to its most hilarious potential. Packed with musical numbers written by Cyndi Lauper, it’s a joyous romp of an evening that can only leave you feeling lighter, happier and full of gay abandon (pun intended).

Food at Ping Pong, Covent Garden

by Thomas Marrington