KINKY BOOTS' Harvey Fierstein

Kinky Boots, the Tony Award-winning musical that brings together four-time Tony Award-winner Harvey Fierstein, two-time Tony Award-winning director/choreographer Jerry Mitchell and Grammy Award-winning rock icon Cyndi Lauper, makes its way to Nashville's Tennessee Perfomring Arts Center next week for a limited, one week engagement February 3-8.

Kinky Boots opened on Broadway on April 4, 2013, and it continues to play to standing room only crowds nightly at the Hirschfeld Theatre, having recouped its costs in October 2013, after just 30 weeks on Broadway.

Kinky Boots took home six 2013 Tony Awards, the most of any show in its season, including Best Musical, Best Score (Cyndi Lauper), Best Choreography (Jerry Mitchell), Best Orchestrations (Stephen Oremus) and Best Sound Design (John Shivers). The show also received the Drama League, Outer Critics Circle, and Broadway.com Awards for Best Musical and the Grammy Award for Best Musical Album.

"Kinky Boots deserved every Tony Award it won. It is a fun, fabulous show with a strong message. This musical shares strong values of friendship, love, and self-identity," says Kathleen O'Brien, TPAC president and chief executive officer. "I absolutely love this show and am proud that TPAC is an investor in the Broadway show as well as the tour."

In Kinky Boots, Charlie Price has reluctantly inherited his father's shoe factory, which is on the verge of bankruptcy. Trying to live up to his father's legacy and save his family business, Charlie finds inspiration in the form of Lola. A fabulous entertainer in need of some sturdy stilettos, Lola turns out to be the one person who can help Charlie become the man he's meant to be. As they work to turn the factory around, this unlikely pair finds that they have more in common than they ever dreamed possible and discovers that when you change your mind about someone, you can change your whole world.

Harvey Fierstein, the legendary Broadway showman and theatrical icon who, chances are, has created some of your most indelible theater memories. Certainly, for me, his La Cage Aux Folles (created with the equally legendary Jerry Herman) is one of my very best theater experiences - it was the first show I ever directed, for Circle Players, back in 1999), and his Torch Song Trilogy is one of the theater's most beloved plays.

Inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2007, Fierstein won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his own play Torch Song Trilogy (about a gay drag performer and his quest for true love and family) and the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for playing Edna Turnblad in Hairspray. He also wrote the book for the musical La Cage aux Folles, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical, and wrote the book for the Tony Award-winning Kinky Boots. He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2007.

As Kinky Boots continues its national tour, which sets down roots in Nashville for a week's worth of performances at TPAC starting Tuesday, February 3, Fierstein talks about the journey of the musical and his collaboration with Lauper and Mitchell...

How did Kinky Boots, the Musical happen? Well, Daryl Roth saw the show at the Sundance Film Festival and bought the rights. She then brought in Hal Luftig as co-producer, and together they got Jerry [Mitchell] on board. I was doing A Catered Affair on Broadway, and I met them before a performance one day to talk about turning Kinky Boots into a musical. And I said, "Oh. Well, I saw the movie, but it didn't strike me as a fascinating story." Obviously, I remembered that there were drag numbers, and I said, "so, you know, those are obvious."

But there was no love story in it, of any weight. And I said, "But, if you're really convinced, I'll at least watch it again." So I looked again and the one thing that REALLY didn't work was the love story of Charlie and those two girls. In the movie, they had her cheat on him and, you know, it was a little misogynistic for me. And I said "But the real love story here is these two gentlemen who become friends." And I thought it was a good opportunity to do this realistically, as opposed to musically - to have, you know, real psychology, because there's not too much story.

And it was actually my brother who suggested Cyndi as the composer. I'd known Cyndi, we'd talked years ago about doing a musical about her family. And she and I had done some stuff for AMFAR. She had done Broadway Bares with Jerry and she really liked him. So when this project came up, she was definitely someone I thought could be interesting.

When you write a musical with someone, you end up spending a lot of time with 'em! Well, you're going to spend the rest of your lives together! That's something that Cyndi does not yet really understand. I mean, I said it to her at the beginning: I said, "we do this and we have a child for the rest of our lives that will always be there." You can't get that, unless you've done it. You know, Jerry Herman and I wrote La Cage 30 years ago now and we speak, you know, every couple of weeks. We have to; we have a 30-year-old child that needs some guidance! So, it's that kind of relationship and you want to make sure that you're with someone that you can do that with.

What's interesting about Kinky Boots is it's really both a big musical and a really intimate musical and it's the "bromance" that really fuels the story. Exactly. It really is a tiny story, which has interested me more and more. It's the human stories; that's what theater's for.

You had to choose ways to compress the film's story to create the musical, but it hews pretty closely to the movie. Yeah. You try - especially if it's a true story - you try to tell some of the truth. You try to keep that stuff. But, it's like being a Monday morning quarterback - you get to see something that's flawed and something that isn't flawed and then you get another crack at it. The movie, as I remembered it, wandered this way and that, at times, and didn't know where it was going. And then, all of a sudden, pull back in. So, I didn't have to do that! You know, I had another crack at it and a clean slate.

I asked Cyndi about writing songs for the theater, as opposed to pop songs, and she really seemed to think that they were similar; you have to have a beginning, middle and end.Well, in theater, we don't have fade outs at the end of a song!

But you had to find a vernacular, if you will, for Charlie and for Lola. Well, her lessons were a lot of fun for me; frustrating sometimes, but fun, on the other hand. Like the first time I took a song of hers and I stopped the song and put the scene in the middle of it and then they kept singing and then more scene. And she said, "What the hell are you doing? What are you doing to my song? Let them sing the god-damned song!" I said, "It's not the way it works." She said, "You wouldn't do that to Rodgers and Hammerstein!" And I said, "Well, you actually would." And I showed her you know some example, I think "Some Enchanted Evening," which has a scene in the middle of it. And she said, "Oh, I didn't notice." And I said, "Exactly. When it's done right, you will never notice, but the show must move on."

I love the way, in the first act, you've got the Angels singing with Lola and you've got the scene with Charlie. You've got two things going at once. You always try to do something new. When I watched the movie, I saw it was a very old fashioned movie sort of structure. And it's not a very big story, as you know. So, to mess too much with normal structure would be to take away from the focus of the story, which is delicate enough as it is. So, I knew I had to do a traditional telling of the story. That said, once you know you're doing the traditional, then it's your job - if you want to take the challenge - of doing different things.

I created an opening number with Cyndi, and then Jerry, of course, that tells the story of all the characters, in relationship to shoes. Everyone in that opening number is defined by a pair of shoes and you know who they are. And it's a sort of fun number, but you're all set up for the rest of the show; Nicola sees them as upward mobility, Lola sees them as her identity, as a girl, though she's a biological boy, and Mr. Price sees it as the family tradition and as "our family tree" and Charlie has no connection at all.

Usually, in a musical, you open with the "I want song." You have a character that wants something. Well, we have a character that doesn't want anything. He doesn't know what he wants. And so I had to work around that and find a way for the audience to like this, for lack of a better word, schlub! But, you know, you have to like your leading character and there's not that much likeable about somebody who doesn't want to do anything! He doesn't want to do what his girlfriend wants to do, he doesn't want to do what his father wants him to do

But, in a way, he is the one who travels the farthest. Exactly! He finds his passion. Here is a character with no passion and he finds his passion. Unfortunately, when he does, he hurts people with it. He's like a bull in a china shop or an infant with a new toy; he doesn't know how strong he is and hurts everybody around him. But it's also gorgeous to see someone find their passion!

And I did some other things. You always try to stay ahead of the audience, so the audience isn't ahead of ou. But, I thought it might be fun to let the audience get ahead of me on two things. Charlie's relationship with Nicola; the audience knows they don't belong together, way before either of them knows they don't belong together. And I thought that was an interesting thing to do. You have an audience that actually is like your best friend. You know how it's easier to give your friends advice. So we have an audience that's now involved on that friend level: "you don't belong with that girl. Look at that other girl, she's much better for you." You have that going on.

Or when Charlie turns on Lola in Act Two. You have an audience going, "you shouldn't do that. This is not nice. This isn't right." He doesn't know it yet, but the audience knows it. And so we participate in watching him grow up. You see the audience so incredibly involved on an emotional level. I think that worked! I'll try it again in my next show, as a technique.

This is not just a story of fathers and sons and expectations. And that moment in the first act, where he sings "I'm Not My Father's Son" is really the crux... Of that blame! But the blame itself, that's the excuse. The fathers have set up these expectations for their sons, their sons failed at that, they've taken this failure on and internalized it and have let it paralyze them. Charlie has a passion for nothing. He didn't want to do what his father wanted him to do and so he wants to do nothing. Lola, on the other hand, has this wonderful life, but it's not a real life, and I can't imagine that Lola actually has sex or relationships with people. It's all on the surface with Lola. And she doesn't believe in herself at all, when he offers her a job as a designer. She says, you know, "I wouldn't trust myself to babysit a cactus. Me, a designer? You're kidding yourself, I'm not worthy of anything like that."

And that's all fine, but at some point, you have to let that go, because, at some point it's really not your parents' fault. At some point, it's your fault. The show's about self-acceptance. It's about saying, "all of this is actually in me and I'm okay with myself." So, that's why the challenge that Lola gives to Don, the other character, is not to accept yourself, it's to accept someone else. And in accepting someone else, you can find the steps to accept yourself. So, you have to get through all that stuff: you have to get through your father, you have to get through judging other people, you have to get through all that to finally find out the truth is in yourself.

One of the things that's great about Kinky Boots is this thing that a lot musicals used to do, but don't always do anymore, which is just give you that kind of emotional lift and joy. I mean, pure joy - the end of the first act and the end of the second act really has that. Jerry and I very much wanted to challenge the finale of Hairspray - until you've been there onstage and heard it... I think it was [New York Post columnist] Michael Riedel who asked me, "What is that roar like; to be standing onstage when that curtain comes down and that audience roars like that?" And I said "It really is a frightening feeling, 'cuz it comes at you. It's like being in a lion's mouth. It really is a roar." And once you've felt that, you get addicted to it; you want that. And Jerry and I said, "because this is a celebratory ending, we have the opportunity to do that."

What's cool about it is that when each of them shows up in those boots, you realize you know every person in that factory. Every person, every person, you do. I mean, the drag queens you don't get to know so much, but you know them because they're each individual. You know, they're a device, an entertaining device! But, every person in that factory, you know who they are.

Tickets to Kinky Boots are available online at www.TPAC.org, by phone at (615) 782-4040, and at the TPAC Box Office, 505 Deaderick Street in downtown Nashville. For group tickets, call (615) 682-4060.

J. Harrison Ghee takes over the role of Lola just in time for its Music City debut next week. Steven Booth (Avenue Q, Glory Days, Dogfight) stars as shoe factory owner Charlie Price. Ghee and Booth are joined by Lindsay Nicole Chambers (Hairspray, Legally Blonde, Lysistrata Jones) as Lauren, Joe Coots (TV's Inside Amy Schumer, Full Monty national tour) as Don, Craig Waletzko (Guys & Dolls, Young Frankenstein) as George, and Grace Stockdale in her touring debut as Nicola.

Rounding out the ensemble are Damien Brett, Stephen Carrasco, Lauren Nicole Chapman, Amelia Cormack, Troi Gaines, Blair Goldberg, Darius Harper, Andrew Theo Johnson, Crystal Kellogg, Jeffrey Kishinevskiy, Jeff Kuhr, Ross Lekites, Patty Lohr, Mike Longo, Tommy Martinez, Kenny Morris, Nick McGough, Bonnie Milligan, Anthony Picarello, Horace V. Rogers, Ricky Schroeder, Anne Tolpegin, Juan Torres-Falcon, Hernando Umana and Sam Zeller.

The design team for Kinky Boots includes Tony Award nominee David Rockwell (Scenic Design), Tony Award winner Gregg Barnes(Costume Design), Tony Award winner Kenneth Posner (Lighting Design), Tony Award winner John Shivers (Sound Design), Josh Marquette(Hair Design), Randy Houston Mercer (Make-up Design), Telsey + Company, Justin Huff, CSA (Casting), Adam Souza (Musical Direction), with Musical Supervision and Arrangements and Orchestrations by Tony and Grammy Award winner Stephen Oremus.

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