"Kinky Boots will be workshopped later this month with a cast that includes Stark Sands (American Idiot, Journey's End) and Billy Porter (Off-Broadway's Angels in America, Broadway's Smokey Joe's Café, Miss Saigon) for a Broadway production in the 2012-13 season," Roth wrote in a newsletter dated January 2012.
As previously reported on Playbill.com, Tony Award winner Jerry Mitchell (Hairspray, Catch Me If You Can and the 2004 La Cage aux Folles, among other shows) will direct and choreograph the musical, co-produced by Roth (The Normal Heart) and Hal Luftig (Legally Blonde).
Kinky Boots the Musical has new music and lyrics by Cyndi Lauper and libretto by Tony Award winner Harvey Fierstein (Torch Song Trilogy, La Cage aux Folles). Musical supervision is by 2011 Tony Award winner Stephen Oremus (Wicked, 9 to 5, The Book of Mormon). Mitchell will direct and choreograph. Casting is by Telsey + Company.
Singer-songwriter Lauper is best known for her offbeat '80s style and such tunes as "True Colors," "Time After Time" and "Girls Just Want to Have Fun." Her show will have a pop-rock sound. The 2005 source film comedy is about a drag-queen cabaret performer who helps revitalize a failing British shoe company by creating a line of fetish wear.
Broadway producer Roth is known for Wit, Proof, August: Osage County and many other Brodway and Off-Broadway shows, and won a 2011 Tony for producing The Normal Heart. Luftig produced Movin' Out and Legally Blonde, among others. Geoff Deane & Tim Firth penned the screenplay of "Kinky Boots." The film was directed by Julian Jarrold. Chiwetel Ejiofor (who played vivacious drag queen Lola) was nominated for a 2007 Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy. The U.K. release was in 2005; the U.S. release was in 2006. In the movie, a son inherits his dead father's dying shoe company, which produces functional footwear for which there is no market. An encounter with a drag performer changes the lives of those in the shoe business. "The story is really about relationships," Roth previously told the Hollywood Reporter, "and I want to find the heart at the center of it."
