KINKY Boots, the award-winning new musical is here for three weeks.

It features Charlie (Joel Harper-Jackson) who inherits a struggling shoe factory saved by a chance meeting with Lola (Callum Francis), a drag queen.

They decide to make kinky boots strengthened for men designed by Lola.

Soon the factory is overwhelmed with work but has ups and downs along the way.

This simple story has a profound emotional effect on people.

It certainly does with me to a point bordering on tears.

Charlie is an ardent heterosexual with a fiancée, Nicola (Helen Ternent) to whom he has some explaining to do.

Also, how do the testosterone filled factory workers, especially. Demetri Lampra’s Don, an alpha male, react when they meet Lola and her counterparts?

Lola bursts with charisma and is undoubtedly the star of the show. Whether or not dressed in drag, ‘she’ is never out of character and is a credit to Callum Francis who won the Helpmann Award for best male actor in a musical after playing the part in Australia.

That doesn’t mean that Harper-Jackson’s Charlie doesn’t have his moments.

His powerful voice reaches the far side of the auditorium when he performs Soul of a Man and Not My Father’s Son.

His friendship with Lola is quite moving.

And then there’s the music. Cyndi Lauper’s score is magical especially the songs written for Lola. They seem tailor-made for Francis’s lilting tenor in numbers such as Hold me in your heart.

The singing and dancing at the end of each act get the audience joining in.

Jerry Mitchell both directs and choreographs this magnificent show and Gregg Barnes spectacular costumes add colour. Well done.

• Kinky Boots is at the Manchester Opera House until Saturday December 1. For tickets, contact atgtickets.com/manchester or telephone 0844 871 3018.

Star rating: * * * * *.