Thursday, March 9, 2017

Kinky Boots: Some context


Paul Ibell takes a bird's eye view of cross-dressing drama pointing out that the tradition of boys dressed as girls goes back to the Tudor and early Stuart reigns in England.  He also talks about English "public" schools where the all-male population meant that boys took female roles in their dramatic productions.  According to Ibell, the French "have traditionally liked to dismiss Englishmen as fundamentally homosexual, and a (female) French government minister made some such disparaging remarks in the 1990s, causing a lot of amusement in the press ..." (29).  He then points to the irony of the success of Jerry Herman's Broadway musical La Cage Aux Folles, which is "based on a French play and set on the French Riviera" and features two gay men (29).

La Cage aux Folles Playbill - Aug 1983
SYNOPSIS: Jerry Herman's musical, based on the French play of the same name, is the story of a flamboyant gay couple who must pretend to be straight for one night — with one of the men in drag — to dupe the conservative political family of their son's fiancee.

See Ch 4 "Boys will be Girls" in Paul Ibell, Theatreland: A Journey through the Heart of London's Theatre.  Continuum Publishing, 2009.

KINKY BOOTS


Here is the Wikipedia entry for Kinky Boots:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinky_Boots_(musical)

The article highlights the origins of this Broadway musical in the 2005 British film of the same name.  The show reflects the internationalization of such spectacle--or at least the close links between British and American drama.
An overview of articles published on Kinky Boots indicates its cultural importance:



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