Reviewing the new drag queen-centered Broadway show Kinky Boots in Monday’s New York Times, critic Ben Brantley chose to dedicate a few paragraphs to the bizarre suggestion that the show should make one think “that maybe all those grumpy guys who populate the Republican debates might be a lot looser if they traded in their navy suits for rainbow-colored ball gowns.”
Following a caveat to mention Carly Fiorina (to avoid coming off as wildly uninformed), Brantley joked that it would “a way to boost ratings” because “the holiday-spirited theatergoers” when he saw a performance “didn’t look much different from the Las Vegas audience for the Republican presidential debate I had seen on television a few days earlier. O.K., maybe there were more children at “Kinky Boots.”
Brantley continued the strange tangent by surmising that conservative Midwesterners would thoroughly enjoy this drag show with Wayne Brady serving in the lead role of Lola:
But I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a straighter-looking, more quintessentially Middle American group assembled for a Broadway show, not even in the heydays of “Cats” and “Mamma Mia!” And this, by the way, was a crowd primed to love Lola — to roar whenever she talked dirty (which is never too dirty) and to take her side against any hidebound macho man who would deny this glamazon her choice to be fabulous.
As if those uncomfortable suggestions weren’t enough, Brantley went onto later state that Brady’s portrayal would win the approval of one’s parents as an appropriate significant other:
Mr. Brady’s Lola is a cross-dresser you could take home to Mother, with the promise that such an encounter might bring out the woman in Dad and the man in Mom, but all in a spirit of G-rated fun. (I was more than ever aware of the lack of genuine sexual content in Mr. Fierstein’s script.)
