The Pajama Game is a musical set in a factory that makes pajamas. Kinky Boots is a musical set in a factory that makes boots and shoes. Both factories have labor problems, but the factory in Kinky Boots has even worse problems.

Charlie Price’s father is the third generation of the family to be the head of the factory, one of the sizable employers in the city of Northampton northwest of London, and he expects Charlie will follow him. Charlie wants to move to London and sell real estate. But when his father dies unexpectedly and Charlie returns home, he discovers that the shoe business is near bankruptcy. The company makes high quality shoes, but they are expensive and not stylish, and they can’t meet the competition from the imported, cheaply-made rivals. 

As Charlie is laying off the workers, many of them people with whom he had grown up, Lauren, one of the women, berates him for not following the example of other factories that have survived by entering an “underserved niche market.” 

Thanks to a chain of lucky coincidences, Charlie does just that. Thinking to rescue a woman from a mugging on a London street, the woman introduces Charlie to the world of drag performers, in which the “woman” is one of the stars. With his shoe-trained eye, Charlie observes that the thigh-high, almost-as-high heels on the women’s boots the men wear don’t really support the weight of a man. 

Charlie has found his niche. He invites Lola, the drag queen, to join him at the factory in Northampton and help him make the boot that drag performers can wear confidently and comfortably. And they do make it, with help from George, the factory manager, and several of the workers. Charlie and Lola take their “Kinky Boots” to the big shoe fashion show in the fashion center Milan, Italy, and with the help of Lola and her back-up “Angels,” they wow the fashion world.

We don’t expect workers on a pajama assembly line to break into song. But you can’t have a drag performer without some song and dance. So Kinky Boots has song and dance. But it also, like The Pajama Game, is a musical, so it has characters who break into song because they are in a musical, and that’s a main way that characters in a musical express themselves. That’s true in Kinky Boots. When Charlie and his girlfriend, who wants to turn the factory into condos, break up, they express it in song. When Charlie finds a new, true love in Lauren, the woman who suggested finding a niche, they express their love in song.

You need a multitalented performer to play Lola, The Tesseract Theatre company has found that in Tiélere Cheatem, who makes flamboyance attractive. As Charlie, Kelvin Urday has no call to be flamboyant, but he conveys, sometimes subtlety, the changes that Charlie must negotiate. Kaitlin Gant’s Laura copes well with the rush of love she suddenly feels for Charlie. I always feel a little sorry for Charlie’s original girlfriend Nicola, who is dumped when she’s trying to help, and Chelsie Johnston certainly makes her appealing. Kent Coffel appears briefly as Charlie’s father and then as George, manager of the factory and very much a factory man. Marshall Jennings plays Don, the factory foreman, who leads some of the other men in making homophobic comments about Lola and winds up in a boxing ring with her. Coordinating well are the members of the Factory Ensemble, Carrie Wenos, Loren Goudreau, Aaron Tucker, Jr., Corrinna Redford, Lindsey Grojean, Sarah Lueken, David Pisoni, Tori Ray, Michelle Sauer, and Josie Schnelten. Lola’s Angels, any one of whom could take over for Lola but are too modest and devoted to do so, are played by Mike Hodges, Todd Garten, Dylan Stanley, Ronnie Wingbermuehle, Jordan Woods, and Nick Zobrist. Both doing fine jobs, Asher Woodward plays the young Charlie and Mark Ambrose Hill plays the Young Lola.

Director and Scenic Designer Taylor Gruenloh, with Lighting Designer Max Demski, have followed a shrewd practice I’m seeing more and more lately in musicals of using only a minimum of standard sets with walls and doors and windows and keeping the stage mostly open for dance, for a boxing ring, for an assembly line to spill across the stage. Up center stands a raised room, used mostly as the factory office, from which Charlie can address the workers below him and have private encounters with others. Maggie Nold’s choreography can have almost the full stage to work on. Nicolas Valdez is the music director, coordinating with pre-recorded music tracks. Zachary Phelps designed the costumes, work clothes for the factory, glitter for the drag cabaret. Phillip Evans designed the sound. Sarah Baucom is the Stage Manager, Kevin Salwasser the Technical Director,  and Brittanie Gunn the Production Manager. 

Kinky Boots may be sort of a kinky musical, but Cyndi Lauper’s music and lyrics and Harvey Fierstein’s book open new vistas for musical theatre, explored well by The Tesseract Theatre Company.

—Bob Wilcox

Photo by Taylor Gruenloh
From the left, Tiélere Cheatem as Lola and Kelvin Urday as Charlie in front of members of the ensemble in Kinky Boots.