Award-winning feel-good phenomenon Kinky Boots struts into our theatre in March! Ahead of the dazzling show on our stage, we caught up with the pop icon behind the music, Cyndi Lauper.

The Eighties punk pop queen who was catapulted to stardom with “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and “Time After Time”, was originally warned off musical theatre. “It was really a big divide. After a while, you get to a point where you’re like, ‘Well, I think I can do whatever the hell I want.’”

The result is Kinky Boots, the musical mega-hit that conquered Broadway and the West End. The songs were written by Lauper and won her a Tony Award for best original composition. In 2016 the show went on to win three Olivier Awards – for Best New Musical, Best Costume Design and Best Actor in a Musical – as well as the London Evening Standard BBC Radio 2 Audience Award for Best Musical and three WhatsOnStage Awards (Best New Musical, Best Actor in a Musical and Best Choreography).

She had never written for theatre before and became the first woman ever to win the Tony in the best score category on her own. “What I was really taken with was that the community accepted me,” she says. “To have these people, that are a literally in my own backyard on Broadway, take you in was what got me.”

Aptly enough, acceptance is the take-home message of Kinky Boots. “Accepting yourself, you’ll accept others,” says Lauper. “It’s a very important show at this time in the world.”

The show is loosely inspired by the story of an old family firm of Northampton shoe manufacturers that was about to go under only to discover a new niche in the market: ladies’ footwear worn by men who like to dress up.

“It’s a story about a really great friendship and two very very opposite people and there’s a great redemption in the end. I’m a sucker for redemption.”

Perhaps there has been some redemption for Lauper too. She was a huge star in the Eighties but, as happened to all her contemporaries bar Madonna, gradually slipped from the top of the chart. She was thinking of creating a musical about her upbringing in Queens when she got a call from her friend Harvey Fierstein. Fierstein is theatre royalty, the writer of the hit play Torch Song Trilogy about a gay drag performer and the cross-dressing star of the musical Hairspray.

“He said, ‘I’m doing a show called Kinky Boots. Would you like to write the music for me?’ I thought, wow. He told me I had to watch the film. I loved it.”

She set about composing anywhere and everywhere. “I brought my phone along with me and I recorded melodies on it. I belonged to a gym where they had a track on an upstairs roof and I would walk and sing and write. When I woke up in the middle of the night I picked up my iPhone.”

The product of four years in development is a string of catchy numbers from wig-out dance anthems to heart-stopping ballads.

At the Tony Awards in 2013, Kinky Boots was up for best musical. “I was constantly asking Harvey if it was a hit and he was saying, ‘I don’t know yet, Cyn. We have to win best musical.’ So when it won best musical I said, ‘Is it a hit now?’”

See it and judge for yourself. You’ll never think about shoes in the same way again…

Kinky Boots runs from Mon 11 – Sat 23 March 2019 – book online here.