A tale of friendship and redemption, Kinky Boots the Musical has stepped into Kent. Here, Cyndi Lauper, who wrote the music, talks about the show.

Eighties punk pop queen Cyndi Lauper’s finding fame all over again with Kinky Boots the Musical - but, if she had listened to some, it might never have happened.

“There’s no book on How to Be Famous for Dummies,” says the 65-year-old.

“So you just do what you can. All of a sudden you get to the top of the mountain and everybody around is like, ‘You can’t do that! Don’t do this! You’ll be ruined!’”

The singer, who was thrust into the spotlight with Girls Just Wanna Have Fun and Time After Time in the 80s, was warned off musical theatre.

“I was always being beckoned, ‘Come this way,’. And I was like, ‘I can’t, because if I do my career is over.’ I would lose my credibility in pop. It was really a big divide.

“But after a while you get to a point where you’re, ‘Well, I think I’ve been ruined enough, it doesn’t matter now, I can do whatever the hell I want’”

The result is Kinky Boots, the musical mega-hit that conquered Broadway and the West End and is now on a UK & Ireland tour, with its opening dates at the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury.

The songs were written by Cyndi, and in New York they won her a Tony Award for best original composition.

In 2016 the show also won three Olivier Awards - for Best New Musical, Best Costume Design and Best Actor in a Musical.

She’d never written for theatre before, and became the first woman ever to win the Tony in the best score category on her own.

“What I was really taken with was that community accepted me,” she says. “To have these people, that are a literally in my own backyard on Broadway, take you in was what kinda got me.”

Acceptance is the take-home message of Kinky Boots. “Accepting yourself, you’ll accept others,” she says. “It’s a very important show at this time in the world.”

The show is loosely inspired by the story of an old family firm of Northampton shoe manufacturers that was about to go under but discovered a niche market: ladies’ footwear worn by men.

But she counsels against thinking of Kinky Boots as a specifically English show.

“It’s a story about a really great friendship and two very very opposite people and there’s a great redemption in the end. I’m a sucker for redemption.”

After being a huge star in the Eighties, Cyndi had gradually slipped from the top of the chart. She was considering creating a musical about her upbringing in Queens when she instead got a call from a friend, Harvey Fierstein, who asked her to write “12 good pop songs with a good hook” to go with a new show he was writing.

“I figured, I could do that. Then I realised, oh, you have to move the story along,” she said.

The product of four years in development is a string of catchy numbers from wig-out dance anthems to heart-stopping ballads, among them The Most Beautiful Thing in The World, The Sex Is in the Heel and Not My Father’s Son.

Ideas came from surprising sources - she even pictured Monty Python’s knights of the round table for the factory workers.

“I gave everybody a different style because everybody has a different jam when they’re in the shower singing,” she adds.

For the tour, West End star Kayi Ushe will be putting on the boots to play Lola, joined by Paula Lane as Lauren, best known for her role as Kylie Platt in Coronation Street, and Joel Harper-Jackson, who recently starred in the The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time UK tour, will be playing Charlie Price.

Audiences in Canterbury may never think about shoes in the same way again.

The show runs at Canterbury’s Marlowe Theatre until Saturday, January 26. To book tickets visit marlowetheatre.com or call 01227 787787. Read our review here.