Kinky Boots worth trying on at the Music Hall

If you’ve been meaning to catch a production of Kinky Boots, the Harvey Fierstein-Cyndi Lauper collaboration that swept the 2013 Tonys, now’s your chance. The national tour beds down in Kansas City for the next five days, and it’s mostly worthwhile.

Kinky Boots is a subversive kind of comfort food, an endearing show about drag queens and red leather to which you can imagine bringing your transphobic grandma. In the production at the Music Hall, the vocals are buoyant, the message sweet, the colors acid-trip bright.

It’s not flawless: Fierstein’s book is paint-by-numbers Broadway, with plot twists you see coming a mile away. And Lauper pins her funk-synth grooves to some grating, facile rhymes. Exhibit A: You’ve gotta take what you’ve got/Even when your life is in knots/You take aim, take your shot/Sometimes, you’ve got to rewrite the plot.

Woof.

Still, fans of drag, glitter and/or the economic challenges facing old-world cobblers shouldn’t be deterred. Go for the finale fashion show, in which costumer Gregg Barnes detonates a box of fabric fireworks. Go for the savagery of J. Harrison Ghee, who plays Lola, the drag Queen Mum, with Lauper-grade vocals and camp. And go for the musical’s surprising scene-stealer: Tiffany Engen, whose energy and fully realized humor (as Lauren, the only interesting point on the musical’s love triangle) stand out against a pantheon of fierce-frocked queens.

That’s no small feat.

Kinky Boots
Through April 10 at the Music Hall, Kansas City Convention Center (301 West 13th Street), 816-513-5000. Times and tickets here.