One of the most buzz-worthy Broadway shows of the spring season is Kinky Boots, the pop musical from composer/lyricist Cyndi Lauper and writer Harvey Fierstein. Adapted from the 2005 British film of the same name, which was itself inspired by real-life events, it tells the tale of Charlie Price, an aimless twentysomething who moves to London with his success-driven girlfriend Nicola, only to be summoned back to his hometown of Northampton after his father passes away. With the family shoe business deteriorating, Charlie reluctantly takes over to try to save jobs and the company. A chance encounter with a drag queen named Lola inspires him to specialize in kinky boots for cross-dressing men who need strong high heels, but at first it’s a hard sell to his employees, some of whom will need to accept Lola as the designer and accept their change of direction. It’s a story about overcoming prejudice and sometimes embracing the outrageous.
A Brisk Pace
To complement the numerous scene changes and brisk pace, scenic designer David Rockwell created an impressive industrial space for the shoe factory (complete with a brick facade that slides out in front of it for exterior scenes), and the rolling set pieces within help transform the factory into other locations. Some places are more defined (a nightclub, a fashion runaway, a nursing home) while others are implied through lighting and minimal props (a London loft, a shoe store window display, a lawyer’s office).
Helping to visually sculpt out the space is the lighting design work of Kenneth Posner, who relished the challenge of being able to convert the factory setting into numerous other venues, including a fashion show in Milan, Italy for the climactic showstopper. On top of the location changes, the Tony Award-winning LD worked to continually reshape the factory environment so that, as he told PLSN, “it feels fresh, as if we’re in different parts of this assembly-line world.” Posner has worked a few times before with Rockwell, who, along with director/choreographer Jerry Mitchell, brought him in early in their creative process for Kinky Boots.
“The conversation was about being in this one location all evening, and how do we keep it interesting and evocative and really explain to the audience that one moment we’re outside of a high end women’s shoe store, and the next moment we’re in front of a London flat late at night,” explained Posner. “Being able to really turn the page or shift the audience’s eye and take them to and define those different locations. In the middle of it all, we did a number called ‘Sex is In the Heel,’ where Lola’s world comes into the factory world for the first time, and these two parallel universes collide.”
Riveting Touches
During this sequence, Lola’s fellow drag queens make their grand entrance to introduce themselves to the workers. Posner said he and Mitchell always had the intent of having the ladies enter the factory world and fit right into that landscape, imbuing it with a nightclub vibe that represents Lola’s world. “Obviously we did that by embracing the notion of club lighting — saturated color and bold angles,” said Posner. “All of the steel rivets in the set are actually LED points that we actually were able to pixelate and put color and movement throughout the set; again, redefining the factory world and really just making it glow from within.”
There is one key rolling set piece that was called the factory office. It’s a two-story unit with a staircase leading up to Charlie’s office. “That ultimately was the device we used to redefine the space and that really created the world of Lola’s club,” said Posner. “If you look at the structure of that piece, it is really a mini-proscenium arch within which we installed small Tokistar lights that define the cabaret quality style of light. The mini-proscenium is backed by the red glitter curtain” for the nightclub sequence, Posner added, noting that the aforementioned LEDs disguised as steel rivets, which “come to life in the land of Lola,” are in that piece. The mini-proscenium “also spins around and becomes the men’s room downstairs, so there are LEDs in the ceiling in the underside of the platform that represent the fluorescent lighting of the bathroom. That is all driven by many, many channels of wireless DMX.” The lighting designer replicated the “harsh, overhead industrial lighting” so common in factories while also maintaining the ability to change direction and get highly theatrical and use bolder colors for Lola’s world.
“I think the thing that was most time-consuming to really get right and fully exploit its natural visual potential was the Milan walls,” said Posner. “I helped an amazing associate named Anthony Pearson program all of these elaborate LED chases and sequences. There are a lot of set electrics built into those Milan walls — diverse electronic flashers and Red/Blue/Green LED — so each compartment is able to be controlled independently and separately. That enabled us to have maximum flexibility and maximum variety in the Milan sequences at the very end of the play. It was just about adding energy and really creating this contemporary fashion [vibe].”
Grit to Glamour
The Milan sequence where Charlie’s company must present their kinky boots to the fashion world is much more over-the-top than the nightclub sequence in which he first sees Lola’s performance. Posner noted that the club is much seedier and much more saturated and uses a slightly simpler, less flashy cueing structure. The Milan event takes on the glamour of a Victoria’s Secret fashion show (“very contemporary and kinetic”), and all the lighting trusses fly in five feet, thus exposing all of the lighting equipment and using Vari-Lites to create a ceiling that puts the audience in “an iconic fashion show world”.
“There are strobes built into those Milan panels, which fly in and cover up the factory walls,” revealed Posner. “They are Mylar, almost mirrored panels, but inside each mirror panel is a lightbox that has a silhouette of a kinky boot, so when they are lit from behind they take on the shape of the boot in multiple colors. Those are all Red/Blue/Green LED.”
In reference to the size of the light plot for the show, which is comprised of Vari-Lites, Posner described it being between a small and medium-sized musical. “The driving force behind the lights, technically, is about 38 or 40 moving lights,” he clarified. “That’s pretty much what drove the design, that and all the internally built scene electrics that were created in scene shops that we consulted on.” He likes Vari-Lites because he is very familiar with them, has become accustomed to using them and loves the color temperature of the light and the quality of the color mixing.
“The biggest challenge [of Kinky Boots] was trying to figure out how to sculpt the actors in the space and squeeze in side light,” declared Posner. The set is not symmetrical. At stage left, there is a conveyor belt that comes through a doorway; immediately upstage from that is an archway. “It was about finding the nooks and crannies to put light in strategic places, so the light plot to that extent is not symmetrical, which helped lend itself to the design and gives it that variety.”
Posner loved lighting Rockwell’s set, which he said allowed him “infinite possibilities, constantly just being able to reshape and carve a space out in many, many different ways.” He also referred to the realistic brick façade that Rockwell created for the exterior of the factory. “It was a lighting designer’s dream as far as how it could transform.” The LD also enjoyed the overall experience of working on the show. “It was a really amazing crew, and the company of actors couldn’t have been a warmer, lovelier group of people. I think that reflects in the audience’s response.”
A Busy Year
It’s been quite a year for Posner. Three musicals he created designs for opened on Broadway between March and May: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella (adapted from the 1957 TV musical), Kinky Boots, and a revival of the 1970s musical, Pippin. They come from three vastly different decades and allowed him to stretch himself creatively.
“Certainly, Cinderella is traditional Rodgers and Hammerstein, score-driven, beautiful and romantic storytelling lighting,” he said, “whereas Kinky Boots has a contemporary feeling about it and goes from the world of the drag queen night club to the gritty quality of the factory and then ultimately to the contemporary fashion world on a runway in Milan. They’re completely different, while Pippin takes place in a circus environment. It was so nice to design three shows in the same season that are so completely different.”
Kinky Boots
Gear
38 Vari*Lite VL3500Q Spots
6 Vari*Lite VL6C+ Spots
14 Chroma Q Color Force 12s
233 ETC Source Fours (14/10°, 30/14°, 71/19°, 93/26°, 23/36°, 2/50°)
84 ETC Source Four PARs
62 PAR 64s (1000W)
6 ARRI 300 Plus Fresnels
16 Mini Ten (work lights)
12 L&E MR16 strip lights (6’3”)
24 Altman Focusing Cyc 3 Cell
60 Wybron Coloram IIs w/5 24 way power supplies
3 Lycian M2 HMI followspots
w/ long throw lenses
1 Motion Labs 24 x 2.4kW relay/cue light system
