GYPSY OF THE MONTH: Charlie Sutton of 'Kinky Boots'

Charlie Sutton has been named one of Broadway's "hottest chorus boys" by Time Out New York, modeled in another magazine's swimsuit issue and been featured on a blog called Favorite Hunks as well as Out magazine's Hot List. So what do you do with that hot hunky physique in his ninth Broadway show? Put him in a bikini.

Every night, when Sutton strides across the stage in a bikini during the second act of Kinky Boots, the Al Hirschfeld Theatre erupts in cheers, whistles and applause. It's his second big ovation of the show. In the first-act number "Sex Is in the Heel," Sutton wows the audience with a quick solo dance--on high heels--that culminates in a jump split.

In Kinky Boots--a new musical adapted from a 2005 British film about a failing shoe factory that reverses its fortune by manufacturing outrageous footwear for cross-dressers--Sutton plays one of the Angels, the fellow drag queens in the Northampton, England, club where Lola (Billy Porter) performs. Sutton wears heels and midriff-baring outfits for most of the show, which is currently in previews and set to open April 4.

The body Sutton flaunts in Kinky Boots is not the same one that attracted so much attention in the past. For this show, he's forgone his usual P90X weightlifting because he needs to be lean instead of buff. "I am skinnier than I've ever been," says Sutton, who's been on a "raw detox diet" for a few months and runs several miles five times a week. His willpower is rewarded with the audience reaction to his bikini scene. "When I go home and eat my carrots, that makes me very happy," he says.

Sutton and the other Angels are featured in Vanity Fair's April issue along with Kinky Boots' stars Porter and Stark Sands and the show's songwriter, Cyndi Lauper; book writer, Harvey Fierstein; and director-choreographer, Jerry Mitchell (see the VF picture here). Sutton was in flamboyant drag for a previous show choreographed by Mitchell, the 2004 revival of La Cage Aux Folles, and he also danced for Mitchell in 2011's Catch Me If You Can. Tall and slender like Mitchell, Sutton acknowledges a physical similarity but says their good working relationship is based on much more. "He's smart," Sutton says. "He knows how to tell the story and focus the story. And if something gets taken away from you--a moment that you really love--you know that it's never about you not being good, it's about it not working in the context of the show. He's lighthearted: He's the first person to say, 'If you get your work done, we go home,' and I love that about him. And he's just a good guy who treats you really well."

About Kinky Boots in particular, "I love that I get to be one character for the whole show," Sutton says. "We get to be individuals--which is why I also love Jerry. Jerry lets individuals be individuals. He's not trying to make it like a Rockette line. He wants you to show who you are to the audience, so that they'll fall in love with you."

Playing just one person, rather than multiple characters as ensemble members often do, allows you to "learn more about the person," Sutton says. So far he's discovered that his Angel is "flirty...she acts stupid but she's not." And: "She loves to go the beach, clearly, since she has a bikini." His character doesn't have a name in the script, but he's given her one: Katie Webber. Yes, that is the name of another Broadway performer, Sutton's castmate in Catch Me If You Can and Wicked. "As soon as they gave me that bathing suit, I was like, 'I'm Katie Webber,'" he explains, adding that the real Katie has okayed the appropriation.

Over the past nine years, Sutton has worked with almost everyone who's passed through the Wicked cast, as he has gone in and out of the show as a swing and occasionally regular chorus member. He first joined the company as a vacation swing in January 2004, only a couple of months after Wicked opened on Broadway. He was taught the choreography by the show's original dance captain, Mark Myars--who has been his boyfriend ever since (though Sutton calls his four-year-old Shorkie, Parker, "the love of my life").

Since Sutton knows all the Wicked ensemble tracks, he's filled in for people not only in the Broadway production but also on the first national tour and in the Chicago and Los Angeles companies. His longest stretches in Wicked on Broadway have been two approximately six-month periods in 2006 and 2009. Meanwhile, he's performed in eight other Broadway shows, the out-of-town tryouts of three of them and three Encores! productions at City Center. The 2½-month break between last fall's Chicago run of Kinky Boots and the start of its Broadway rehearsals earlier this year has been Sutton's longest period of unemployment since he moved to NYC right out of high school a decade ago. And those 2½ months off were by choice, as he'd done no fewer than five shows in the preceding year. "I was a little tired after months of back-to-back shows--one closing and the other opening, and closing and opening, and putting up new shows," he says.

This is the rundown, starting just over a year ago, in late 2011: Sutton was an understudy and the dance captain for the short-lived Broadway company of Lysistrata Jones. Right after it closed he went into Wicked for two weeks. Then he joined the revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying for a few months in the first half of 2012--and during that time was also in two shows at Encores!, Pipe Dream and Merrily We Roll Along (the latter with musical staging Dan Knechtges, who'd directed Lysistrata Jones). From How to Succeed it was on to rehearsals and then the Chicago tryout of Kinky Boots.

Previous years were busy for Sutton too. In 2010 he did two new Broadway musicals, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and The Addams Family. In 2009 he was in the world premieres of The Addams Family (in Chicago) and Minsky's, a Charles Strouse musical set in the Depression-era burlesque world that played at L.A.'s Ahmanson Theatre.

Minsky's was directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, one of the many top choreographers with whom Sutton's worked. When he was just 18 and brand-new to New York, Sutton impressed Wayne Cilento enough to win a part on the national tour of Aida. He actually got it while auditioning for Wicked, also choreographed by Cilento. Women on the Verge was choreographed by Christopher Gattelli (a future Tony winner for Newsies), and Sutton was in the 2008 Encores! On the Town choreographed by Warren Carlyle, who's had five shows on Broadway in the past year and a half. Then there's Sutton's repeated work with Mitchell and Rob Ashford, who directed and choreographed both How to Succeed and the earlier Cry-Baby.

To this day Cry-Baby, which lasted only two months on Broadway in 2008, remains a favorite of Sutton's--and the hardest thing he's ever done. Specifically, the prison-break number "A Little Upset," which entailed about seven minutes of nonstop dancing, some of it with license plates attached to his shoes. "We used to come off of the prison break and, I'm not kidding you, I would literally stand over a trashcan and spit up," Sutton recalls. "It was so hard--and I loved every moment of it."

That's the kind of dancing Sutton prefers, and why he and Ashford are well-suited for each other. "Some people want to just breeze through their show, but I like a hard show. I like when I sweat," Sutton says. "Rob pushes you until you can't go anymore. Like 'Brotherhood of Man' [in How to Succeed]. That wasn't as hard as Cry-Baby, but you still weren't sure if you were going to die or not. To me, that's fun."

The energetic La Cage numbers--for which Mitchell won the choreography Tony--were tough too. But they did help groom Sutton for the dancing in skirts and heels he does in Kinky Boots. He also had a brief scene in drag in Women on the Verge. "Three shows later, yeah, I feel comfortable," Sutton says about dancing in women's clothes, though he notes that the Kinky Boots shoes are "definitely the highest I've ever worn."

On Kinky Boots' opening night, Sutton expects to receive the Gypsy Robe, given to the ensemble member with the most Broadway credits. "That's crazy to think, at 28 I'm getting my Gypsy Robe," he says. But he wasted no time getting started accumulating those credits. The Miami native came to New York as a newly enrolled freshman at Marymount Manhattan College. He stayed in school for a month. "It was a way for my parents to pay for me to come to the city," he admits. "I knew I didn't want to go to school, so I went to a lot of auditions." His career launched with six months on the Aida tour, after which he joined Wicked at age 19.

He's been dancing since he was toddler. Sutton's mother, a former majorette, danced in local shows and troupes in south Florida--when she was pregnant with Charlie, her water broke while she was on stage. "My mom would take me to her rehearsals, and I'd just stay in the back and do the routine with them," he says. Eventually, when he was around 4, she put him in dance class. He spent more and more time at the studio growing up, participating in dance competitions and training about seven hours a day by the end of high school. He attended the New World School of the Arts, a performing arts magnet school, and performed regularly on Univision's Spanish-language variety show Sábado Gigante, filmed in Miami.

Musical theater didn't come into his sights until almost his senior year in high school. "I wanted to go to L.A. and be a music video dancer," Sutton says. "I grew up on the MTV world." But his dance teacher redirected him. "He said, 'That's not the world for you; you should look into theater.' Once I started doing it, I realized it was more interesting. I'm technical, and I'm good at telling a story and evoking feelings out of people. The dance world in L.A., you just have to throw your hair around and be fierce."

Later, as a professional, Sutton would discover another side of the business he wasn't cut out for. "As soon as you become a gypsy in a Broadway show, everyone feels like the next step is to be the lead, and the next thing is to be in TV and film...so I jumped on board and tried to become an actor and get into movies," Sutton recounts. "For about three years I kept pushing dance aside, like, 'They can't see me as a dancer,' 'I have to understudy everybody,' blah blah blah. What I learned is, if you don't listen to yourself in all of this madness you'll get lost. I wasn't actually doing what I wanted to do, what my heart was telling me to do. I was going after something I didn't really want."

With parts in such movies as The Producers and I Am Legend behind him, Sutton has focused on stage work--though he recently choreographed the opening credits for a TV pilot. He wants to do more choreography for the theater, and for the past year or so has been involved as choreographer on a project aiming for Broadway. Sutton says he can't reveal further details about it at this time but it will be announced within the year--and "it's very exciting, and huge."

Photos of Charlie, from top: seated right, in Kinky Boots; front right, in a dressing room on opening night of Catch Me If You Can with (clockwise from Sutton) Bob Gaynor, Grasan Kingsberry, Jerry Mitchell, Aleks Pevec, Joe Aaron Reid, Will Erat and Nick Kenkel; right, with his partner, Mark Myars, and their dog, Parker; left, during curtain call at The Addams Family, with Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth in foreground and Rachel de Benedet and Clark Johnson in back; left, in Cry-Baby, with James Snyder (right); left, in Minsky's with (from left) Jennifer Frankel, Ariel Reid and Nathan Balser. [Kinky Boots photo by Matthew Murphy; Minsky's photo by Craig Schwartz]