SONGWRITING / KINKY BOOTS / INSPIRATION
Cyndi Lauper
A voice that can
change form.
By Rob Urban
A new form asks
a different question.
A distinctive voice can become so recognizable that an audience expects it to remain in the same setting. The familiar sound becomes attached to a familiar format, and moving elsewhere can look like a departure before anyone has considered the new work.
Cyndi Lauper’s writing for Kinky Boots offers another way to think about that movement. She wrote its music and lyrics, alongside Harvey Fierstein’s book, and won the 2013 Tony Award for Original Score. The award is a useful place to begin. The more revealing story is in what she was willing to change along the way.
There were songs she loved that the show could no longer use. There was an actor whose musical instincts sent her back to listen. There was a collaborator who interrupted a song with a scene, to her initial dismay. These are wonderfully human details in a celebrated achievement. They let us see someone with a formidable artistic identity becoming curious about what other people needed from it.
Even a song
you love.
In an interview with the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Lauper described losing songs she loved because the book or a character’s arc had changed. A song that would have earned a place on one of her own records might have to leave this show.
I admire the distinction she was willing to make. Liking something you have created is an important judgment. A musical asks for another judgment alongside it: does this belong to the person, the scene and the story we are making now?
That question can be difficult precisely when the work is good. A weak passage is easier to surrender. Something beautiful can persuade its maker to rearrange everything around it, even after the reason for its presence has disappeared. Making room for a better whole requires affection for that whole before it is finished.
In dramatic writing, timing carries meaning. A thought expressed before a discovery does different work from the same thought expressed after it. The song has a place in a story, and that place gives it responsibilities.
The scene inside the song.
Fierstein offered an especially vivid example in Jeff Lunden’s NPR report. He recalled inserting dialogue into one of Lauper’s songs, letting the singing resume, then returning to the scene. Lauper objected. He showed her examples from the musical theater tradition, including Rodgers and Hammerstein, where she had not noticed the same technique.
There is a lovely invitation in that exchange. An admired work can still have something to teach you about how it works. You can know its emotional effect intimately and discover a structural decision you had never heard as a decision.
The lesson also asks for trust. A song interrupted on the page may become more continuous in the theater because the character keeps thinking, speaking and responding. The musical line shares the task of carrying a life forward. Learning that possibility gives a songwriter another way to reach an audience.
She asked what
he grew up singing.
Actor Stark Sands, the original Broadway Charlie, described another revision in an interview for TDF. An early song was not connecting with him. Lauper asked what he had listened to while learning to sing. He named artists including Weezer, Pearl Jam, Elton John and Cat Stevens. She listened to them and, two days later, sent him a voice memo of a new song.
That is a generous question to ask a performer. It recognizes a musical history already living in the person who will carry the work into the room. Sands had learned to sing through particular sounds, habits and enthusiasms. Those could become useful information.
It is also a very practical kind of listening. She asked something specific enough to act on, then returned with work. The exchange makes collaboration feel less mysterious: one person describes where their abilities have grown, and another finds a way to write toward them.
A recognizable creative voice does not require every character to sound as though they share one personality. It can appear in the larger decisions: emotional directness, musical contrasts, the shape of a scene or the relationship between vulnerability and confidence.
Two people.
Enough room
for both.
The licensed synopsis centers Charlie, who inherits a struggling shoe factory, and Lola, a drag performer whose need for suitable boots offers the business a possible future. Their partnership puts financial pressure and personal difference into the same room.
In a Q&A published by Purdue Convocations, Lauper spoke about the pain of feeling you have disappointed a parent. She connected the story to what she had observed between parents and children, including the changing relationship between a child and a father. That recognition helped her approach people whose circumstances were very different.
This is where the craft and the kindness belong together. A character who initially seems easy to categorize becomes someone with a longing the audience may recognize. The writing has to give that person enough specificity to remain themselves while allowing another person to understand them.
The shared feeling does not make Charlie’s and Lola’s lives interchangeable. It gives them somewhere to begin understanding each other. That is a more interesting foundation for friendship than requiring either one to become a copy of the other.
A voice in company.
The original Broadway recording’s credits name Stephen Oremus for music supervision, arrangements and orchestrations, alongside Lauper’s music and lyrics and the performers who give the characters their voices. The Tony record also recognizes Jerry Mitchell’s choreography, Billy Porter’s performance as Lola and John Shivers’s sound design among the show’s six wins.
The audience experiences relationships among all those contributions. A song must be performed. A scene must connect with what comes before and after it. The complete work has a pace and an emotional shape that no single credit explains alone.
Specific credit matters because admiration becomes more accurate when we understand what each person made. Lauper’s achievement grows more interesting in company. We can appreciate the imagination of the composer and the imagination required to make room for the performer, the arranger and the story.
Still herself.
Still discovering.
What I find encouraging in Lauper’s Kinky Boots work is the possibility of development without self-erasure. A creator can enter a new form and take its demands seriously while bringing the qualities that made the earlier work distinctive.
For anyone who writes, that is a useful freedom. You can maintain a point of view without forcing every subject into the same argument. You can let a different person, a different audience or a different occasion change the shape of what you make.
Lauper had enough confidence in her voice to keep finding other uses for it. In these accounts of the show’s creation, that confidence is active and sociable: asking a question, listening to a recording, reconsidering a song, returning with another possibility. There is room in that version of artistic identity for surprise. There is room for other people.
About Cyndi Lauper and Kinky Boots
What did Cyndi Lauper write for Kinky Boots?
Cyndi Lauper wrote the music and lyrics for Kinky Boots. Harvey Fierstein wrote the book. Lauper won the 2013 Tony Award for Original Score for the musical.
What is Kinky Boots about?
The musical follows Charlie, who inherits a struggling shoe factory, and Lola, a drag performer. Their partnership to make boots gives the factory a possible future while challenging how they understand themselves and each other.
How did Lauper work with the original Broadway cast?
Stark Sands, who played Charlie, described Lauper asking about his musical influences when an early song was not connecting with him. After listening to the artists he named, she sent him a new song. His account illustrates how the performers helped inform the writing.
Sources: interviews published by the Denver Center, NPR, TDF and Purdue Convocations; Music Theatre International; Masterworks Broadway; and the Tony Awards. Checked September 2026. Reflections are Rob Urban’s.
I write about people whose work makes me think more carefully about my own. For more of those thoughts, or a conversation about writing and the work you want to share, meet Rob.