Kinky Boots, London Coliseum ★★★½

Kinky Boots, London Coliseum: radiant on stage, but the story has got lost

Big shows on big stages have a particular problem: everything gets further away. Kinky Boots first played London at the Adelphi, a house of around 1,500 seats; now, hot off a UK tour and after a long absence, it’s back in the West End at the London Coliseum, the largest theatre in the West End at 2,359 seats.

Robert Jones’ Northampton factory floor fills the Coliseum’s vast stage, an impressive scale for a show that started life on a much smaller one, and Johannes Radebe’s Lola arrives through a trap door with the kind of entrance that earns its applause before a word is sung. Nikolai Foster directs.

But there’s a cost to that scale, and I had the rare chance to measure it directly.

I first saw Kinky Boots in 2018, at the Adelphi, from the stalls. This time round, at the Coliseum, my husband and I were in the balcony, alongside our daughter, seeing the show for the first time. Same night, same seats, same production. The only real variable was memory.

And it showed. The scene in which Charlie stumbles into the fight that lands him at Lola’s club (the hinge the entire plot turns on) was staged in a back corner, easy to lose from above. Charlie’s office, where several key conversations play out, sits on an upper level that the balcony simply can’t see into. My husband and I filled those gaps without noticing we were doing it, because we already knew where the story was going. Our daughter had nothing to fill them with, and lost the thread at exactly those points.

It’s worth being precise about what that means: this isn’t a case of a story being inherently hard to follow. It’s a production that, from a meaningful chunk of its own auditorium, is currently relying on audience familiarity to bridge staging choices that don’t quite reach the cheap seats. For a show that’s meant to win new converts as much as welcome old ones, that’s a real design problem, not a matter of taste. These seats were not sold as restricted.

Some direction choices add to the confusion. Lola’s girls and the factory are sometimes performing at the same time in and around each other, and again, without familiarity, this can add to the muddle. Likewise the decision at some points to have young Charlie on stage at the same time as adult Charlie. Surprising too, two characters walking out through the side wall of the toilet.

Lola (Radebe) is multi-layered: brash, bold in one moment, and hurt young Simon from Clacton, rejected by his father, in the next. Radebe is well known and beloved as a Strictly Come Dancing professional, and that dance ability shows through, real flair in every routine. His singing serves him well and he earns his place on the Coliseum stage. Foster’s direction does not clearly lay out Don (Billy Roberts) as a hardened homophobe, he just seems a bit aloof and quite cross. This makes the conflict scenes in the second half seem rather sprung upon you. Likewise, Lauren (Courtney Bowman), Charlie’s colleague, clearly has a crush on him but there is no hint given that he in any way reciprocates until they kiss in a Milan happy ending.

The Milan scene has a sparkly, colourful set and the whole atmosphere is joyously triumphant. The factory too is evocatively presented, wooden, dated, full of brown leather, echoing its dated products and hopes. It is perhaps too overbearing though, meaning that London scenes, and scenes between Charlie and his fiancée Nicola (Billie-Kay), do not seem rooted in a place, as we can always see the factory in the background.

The sound levels do not always work; for example, in the boxing scene we could not hear all the commentary.

The spectacle is all there, some radiant dancing and colour and costume, but the story seems to have got lost. This is a pity, as the charm of this musical is that it is loosely based in something real.

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