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  • Cindy Lauper And ‘Kinky Boots’ Cast And Crew Had Audience Jumping To Their Feet

    Musical Broadway show, Kinky Boots, had a great start with their opening night as the audience jumped to their feet at the curtain call.

    Kinky Boots has irresistibly endearing characters, crazy couture, a mix of emotional ballads and over-the-top ensemble numbers, and the kind of energy that had the audience dancing in their seats.

    Cyndi Lauper, the lyricist of the show together with director Jerry Mitchell and writer Harvey Fierstein, joined the cast and producers for the curtain call on stage. All of them received bouquets of flowers and the loudest cheers coming from their audience.

    Lauper went for a punkish retro look with her off-shoulder red dress, paired with black leather stilletos and fingerless gloves as she entered the red carpet for the show.

    And though her shoes were killing her, Lauper said that the musical show was great and incredible. “This show has huge heart,” Lauper said. “It’s a story about love and acceptance and friendship and overcoming obstacles.” Lauper also danced with Matt Henry, who plays a drag queen named Lola, as the show’s finale song, “Raise You Up,” played on. The cast were delighted and overwhelmed with the audience response to their show. In true Kinky Boots form, the curtains went down to the show’s resident drag queens twerking for the roaring crowd. Kinky Boots was adapted by writer, Harvey Fierstein, from a British comedy show with the same title. It was shown on Broadway in 2013. And with its music and lyrics by Lauper, Kinky Boots won the 2013 Tony Award for Best Musical and broke all box office records at New York’s Al Hirschfeld Theatre.

    The successful opening night of Kinky Boots marks the end of the previews for three weeks and will be the start of eight shows a week at the Adelphi Theatre in London’s West End.

  • Cyndi Lauper Reveals Her Secret Disease That She Keeps Covered Up

    Cyndi Lauper has come forward with an admission about something that almost wrecked her career. The Kinky Boots producer has joined a campaign to help sufferers of psoriasis, and is revealing some pretty personal details about her own battle with the disease in the process.

    “First, I thought I just had a really bad bleach job,” Lauper says. “I am a suicide blonde after all.”

    So she got a special shampoo from a dermatologist. But her troubles did not end there.

    “My whole entire body was covered in a rash and scaly skin. And then it just stared creeping up my neck. I felt swallowed by it. My immune system got a little wacky, and it took my strength away,” says Lauper. “My skin was so inflamed, it could not regulate hot and cold, so I had the chills all the time.”

    Since Cyndi Lauper had a public image for dressing flamboyantly and wild, she used that to her advantage.

    “I dyed my hair red, put extensions in and then I just wore a wig so I wouldn’t have to mess with my scalp too much,” Lauper said. “It really started to hurt.”

    As the disease spread to other parts of her body, she had to cover up more.

    “I just kept wearing higher-necked clothes, turtlenecks and long sleeves,” she says. “I looked like a nun. It’s not an attractive look. I like to wear tight clothes so what am I gonna do, wear a potato sack? No.”

    Her skin flaked off so badly during her onstage shows that she started wearing a mesh body suit under her clothes. “When I took it off, it was like ‘Ugh,’” she says. “The people I was working with would look at me and say, ‘That looks like it hurts.’”

    “It was so bad, I felt like the Elephant Man,” says Lauper

    Now Cyndi Lauper hopes her story helps others who are ashamed of how their skin condition may be perceived in public.

    “You don’t have to suffer in silence or live in pain,” says Lauper. “It’s not just a rash. It’s a disease.”

    Her dermatologist diagnosed her with psoriasis and gave her a special shampoo.

    But that was just the beginning. Two years later, the rash flared up and “kicked into something scary,” she says.

    “I tried every kind of natural cure I could,” says Lauper, who at times was so weak she couldn’t leave her bed. “It was like I Love Lucy. I felt like a mad scientist mixing this and that.”

    To this day, Cyndi Lauper still doesn’t know what kicked the whole thing off, but she knows that certain foods and other factors make it worse. And she knows it almost derailed her career entirely.

    “Everybody says it’s stress but I’ve always had stress,” said Lauper. “My whole job is stress.”

    Once her voice started to be affected, Lauper felt she was at a new low.

    “I lost it. I stopped singing for a while. I felt depressed and I felt horrible.”

    “I’m not alone,” says Lauper. “There are 7.5 million Americans with this. Find a doctor who specializes in psoriasis and find a treatment. Find what works for you. You gotta keep going because if not, you’ll end up on your butt like I was.”

    “I don’t want anyone to be a silent psoriasis sufferer,” she says. “You can’t just lay in the dark and get depressed and feel like the disease has won. You can win, just get the information and get help – because suffering in silence really sucks.”

  • Cyndi Lauper Got ‘Kinky’ Inspiration From Her Son

    Cyndi Lauper has come a long way since her “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” days. Not that the superstar leaves all that behind her. It is as much a part of who she is now as her “Kinky Boots” awards or her husband and son.

    In fact, it is the way Lauper weaves together all the disparate parts of her life that makes her so successful. She has always been a fighter, even from the first album.

    “I had to wrestle my way onto my own album,” Lauper said of She’s So Unusual. “They said, ‘You should just stand there and sing. You should dress like Katrina and the Waves.’”

    Cyndi Lauper is now 61 years old. She got where she is by not doing what people would expect.

    She watched her son growing up, how he interacted with his father, and used those lessons to inform her writing of songs for “Kinky Boots.”

    “‘I’m Not My Father’s Son’ [from Kinky Boots] is about unconditional love and about being true to yourself,” says Lauper. “Not everyone has an ideal relationship with their fathers, and sometimes there is some stuff you can’t fix, but even Lola, whose dad rejects him, was able to find some closure with his father in the show.”

    “I started observing my own son and husband,” Lauper says. “I got a lot of the lyrics in the chorus from watching [my son] Declan, how when he was really small he just imitated his dad … tried to walk like him and be just like him.”

    “When kids are little, they try to be exactly like their dads,” Lauper observed. “But in the end, all little boys have to grow up and be the men who they are supposed to be, not the image of what they think their fathers want.”

    Lauper even found inspiration from her mother-in-law who, she says, “used to tell my husband he had ‘the patience of Job,’ which I think all good fathers have to have,” says Lauper. “David is a great dad.”