Review: KINKY BOOTS at Château Du Karreveld

Some Broadway musicals, even when they are hits, are sometimes forgotten and never revived — Thoroughly Modern Millie and, closer to this one, The Full Monty. Others suddenly come back with a vengeance and risk overexposure, and this year Kinky Boots has landed firmly in the second camp.

The Bruxellons production lands in the middle of a genuinely crowded year for the title. The big musical at the London Coliseum this year was a new, large-scale English staging that leaned into the show's English roots rather than replicating Broadway's, a separate, long-awaited French-language adaptation by Christopher Lopez is coming to the Folies Bergère next February in Paris, and the English Theatre in Frankfurt has just announced its own production as its winter attraction. Against that backdrop of Kinky Boots turning up everywhere at once, any liberties the talented Bruxellons team has taken with the material are more than welcome — and the biggest of those liberties arrives before the curtain rises.

The 2005 film that inspired Kinky Boots dramatised the real struggles of the WJ Brooks shoe factory in Earls Barton, England, which pivoted from men's formal footwear to fetish boots for drag performers to survive; Cyndi Lauper and Harvey Fierstein turned that story into a stage musical that premiered in Chicago in 2012, won the Tony Award for Best Musical on Broadway the following year under Jerry Mitchell's original direction and choreography, and later opened in the West End to equally great success. 

This is the tenth major musical Festival Bruxellons! has staged in the courtyard of the Château du Karreveld since adopting the format in 2015 — a run that has taken in The Sound of Music, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, Blood Brothers, Elisabeth , Evita, Sunset Boulevard, Come From Away, and, last year, Rebecca — and the festival's now-familiar recipe of French adaptation, live orchestra and a company of some sixty performers and musicians is once again in evidence, here under co-directors Nicoline Hummel and Kylian Campbell, with Stéphane Laporte's French text and musical direction by Laure Campion. 

Lola was written for a Black performer — Billy Porter originated the role on Broadway, Matt Henry took it on in the West End, and Lauper and Fierstein have been on record with a preference for Black actors in future stagings — and Bruxellons' casting of Vincent Heden, a white performer, in the role drew real controversy in the Belgian press and on social media ahead of opening night. It is a bold choice, but nonetheless an interesting variation on the character rather than a simple substitution: Heden, one of France’s finest, with more than two decades in musical theatre behind him (Young Frankenstein, Pajama Game) — nominated for a Molière in 2025 for Belles de scène, in which he already appeared in drag — plays Lola with a real feel for the balance the part needs, warm and approachable one moment, sharp and provocative the next, without tipping into caricature in either direction. 

He is matched by a genuinely strong company. Loïc Suberville's Charlie — an American-trained performer whose Bruxellons résumé already includes Oz in Come From Away, alongside stints as Pumbaa in The Lion King and the Genie in Mickey and the Magician at Disneyland Paris — gives the role the earnest, slightly overwhelmed decency it needs, and the production around them is cast right down the line with the kind of vocal and acting assurance Bruxellons has built its reputation on. Standing out are Lucie Hoellinger as Nicola, Maude Henssens as Lauren, and Neils Batens (Sunset Boulevard) as Don.  Of course, the evening also belongs to the multi-talented and indomitable Angels: Maxime Pannetrat, Timothée Charles Aufrey, Douwe Debroux, Mathis Marco, Sasha Thibert, and Killian Vialette.

Choreography, credited to Alexia Cuvelier and Kylian Campbell — the latter a Geneva-trained dancer whose own performing career runs from the Grand Théâtre de Genève to the Ballet National de Cuba, and who has choreographed or directed several of Bruxellons' recent musicals — is sharp and confident where it appears, but it leans a bit too heavily on Lola's six Angels rather than folding the whole company into the big numbers the way Jerry Mitchell did on Broadway; the effect is a show that dances brilliantly in patches rather than continuously. 

The first act also seems to drag a bit, and it's the second that pulls the show together and sends the audience out on a high. Lauper's score, meanwhile, does what it says on the tin rather than more than that — it's an effective, serviceable and pleasingly retro reminder of her own pop catalogue, but it rarely produces the kind of soaring, hummable show-tune melody that lingers after leaving the theatre. 

Kinky Boots may not be Bruxellons' best musical effort, but it really is a feel-good show. Unlike most successful Broadway fare, it’s, characteristically, greater than the sum of its parts despite some of the weaknesses intrinsic to the book by Feinstein, who had a sharper, more daring edge in Torch Song Trilogy and La Cage aux Folles. Put together, as ever, with the kind of care, craft and evident love for the material that the festival brings to its summer show every year, the result is another genuinely enchanting evening in the Karreveld courtyard. 

Coming at the end of the month is a chamber piece gem of a two-hander musical John & Jen, with a score by Andrew Lippa (Addam’s Family, The Wild Party), following the footsteps of last year’s Good Bye, Norma Jean just next door at the Grange Theatre — and next year’s choice of summer musical is a very good one, since it will be the first French version of something too rarely mounted: Jekyll & Hyde, which has such a tuneful score by the great Frank Wildehorn (Bonnie & Clyde, Death Note).

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