Review: KINKY BOOTS Kicks Off Summer at Broadway At Music Circus

After being dark for two years, Broadway at Music Circus opened its 2022 season with Kinky Boots, the glittery hit from Broadway legend Harvey Fierstein and 80s icon Cyndi Lauper. After opening on Broadway in 2013, it surprised everyone by surpassing its competition and securing a season-high 13 Tony Award nominations and 6 wins. In addition to Best Musical, Kinky Boots won the Tony for Best Original Score, making Lauper the first woman to win alone in that category-in her first foray into Broadway composing.

It's been a long wait, but Music Circus has come back with a bang. A flashy, loud, and fabulous explosion of color, glitter, high-heels, big hair, and bigger personalities. Kinky Boots is loosely based on a true story of a failing shoe factory and its owner who must get creative to save it. Charlie Price, played by an astonishingly energetic and gifted Zach Adkins, is thrust into a role he didn't think he wanted when his father suddenly passes away and he must go back to his hometown to run the family shoe business. Unbeknownst to him, people aren't interested in buying practical, expensive men's footwear anymore. Forced with laying off people that he has known for years, Charlie realizes, with a little help from his special employee Lauren (a reminiscent-of-Cyndi Lauper-Hayley Podschun), that he will need to cater to a niche group to keep the factory alive. Luckily, fate comes prancing in on its stilettos in the bodacious, buxom, and bedazzled form of Lola (Alan Mingo, Jr.), who turns the struggling factory into a beehive of excitement as the crew prepares to bring the new line of Kinky Boots by Lola to the runways of Milan.

Mingo, Jr. brings his outré footwear to Sacramento after playing Lola in the Broadway run of Kinky Boots and shows us that what Lola wants, Lola gets. She and her posse of divas, the "Angels," strut and dance in heels that I couldn't even stand in and thrill with their charisma in "Sex Is in the Heel," "Everybody Say Yeah," and the standing ovation-worthy closer, "Raise You Up." Somehow, Lola also manages to pack a lifetime of wisdom into those boots and leaves everyone with a lesson appropriate for Pride month. "Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken."

Kinky Boots plays at Broadway at Music Circus through June 19. Tickets may be purchased at BroadwaySacramento.com, by visiting the Box Office at 1419 H Street in Sacramento, or by calling (916) 557-1999. More information can be found at BroadwaySacramento.com.

Photo Credit: Kevin Graft

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