To prepare for his role as Lola in “Kinky Boots,” Billy Porter (above and right) took up Bikram yoga so he could be strong enough to walk the stage in heels. (Anne Wermiel/NY Post)
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Not since Harvey Fierstein’s Tony-winning turn in “Hairspray” have Broadway’s leading men gotten so much mileage from a dress.
This time around, it’s Bertie Carvel and Billy Porter, whose cross-dressing turns in “Matilda” and “Kinky Boots,” respectively, have them vying tonight for best leading actor in a musical.
Granted, the dames they play couldn’t be more different: Carvel’s Miss Trunchbull bullies schoolchildren, while Porter’s drag queen, Lola, is a loving, high-heeled lesson in self-esteem. Padding and makeup aside, though, the biggest transformations are the ones the audience can’t see. As a Cyndi Lauper song in “Kinky Boots” puts it, “Sex Is in the Heel” — but gender’s often in the mind of the performer.
For Porter, the preparation began as soon as he landed the role, in November 2011. He started taking Bikram yoga to strengthen his body, all the better to stalk the stage in high heels. Later, he went to a gym to build muscle, and somewhere along the way lost about 20 pounds from his 5-foot-10 frame.
“I’m the kid who was stealing my auntie’s high-heeled shoes from her closet, so walking in them wasn’t a problem — for five minutes at a time,” says the 43-year-old Pittsburgh native. “But to do this show eight times a week, you have to build the muscles in your feet, your back and your core.”
He’d had drag roles before, but never as lavish as Lola. And as far as research goes, he says, “As a black gay man living in New York City since 1990, that’s the only research I needed!”
Nevertheless, he wasn’t prepared for his first look at himself as Lola after the makeup and hair people got through with him, an hour-long process of highlighting, powdering and painting — and then a wig and those infamous boots. When he finally looked in the mirror, he says, he thought of a line from “The Color Purple”: “Harpo, who dis woman?”
As far as Carvel’s concerned, Miss Trunchbull — Roald Dahl’s ex-Olympic hammer thrower turned hellish headmistress — is just another character. “Playing a woman is like playing a psychopath or someone whose sexuality is different to mine,” says the 35-year-old Brit, the son of a psychologist and a journalist. “On some level, most people probably recognize that underneath this portrait of a woman is a young man. It’s make-believe. All make-believe!”
One of his most fervent believers is Rob Howell, the show’s costume designer. Working closely from Dahl’s book, Howell sketched out what he thought Trunchbull should look like before Carvel signed on.
“But you can’t wear a drawing,” Howell says. “And when you have someone like Bertie, you’d be crazy to go on that journey without him.”
Together, they created a bodysuit that turned Carvel’s slim, 6-foot self into, well, not Fudgie the Whale, but a powerful female former athlete. It bulks up his shoulders, arms and solar plexus, and is covered in a smocklike coat Howell describes as “like nothing you’ve ever seen before, yet strangely familiar.”
“What you don’t want is Trunchbull coming out in clothes you recognize or, God forbid, actually own yourself,” he says. “You want her to be otherworldly, strange and slightly disconcerting” — especially when she hurls a small child into the orchestra.
“In the end, it’s all Bertie’s skill and technique and sensibilities,” Howell says. “It’s Bertie who makes us feel it’s plausible.”