Cyndi Lauper knows how to work a crowd. Making her Broadway debut as a composer with “Kinky Boots,” the new musical that opened on Thursday night at the Al Hirschfeld Theater, this storied singer has created a love- and heat-seeking score that performs like a pop star on Ecstasy. Try to resist if you must. 

But for at least the first act of this tale of lost souls in the shoe business, you might as well just give it up to the audience-hugging charisma of her songs.

“Kinky Boots,” with a book by Harvey Fierstein and directed by Jerry Mitchell, is a reminder that you don’t always have to be a masochist to enjoy being smashed by a steamroller. From the outset, this show comes rushing at you head-on, all but screaming: “Love me! Love me!” It’s a shameless emotional button pusher, presided over — be warned — by that most weary of latter-day Broadway archetypes, a strong and sassy drag queen who dispenses life lessons like an automated fortune cookie.

Yet, for a good while, “Kinky Boots” manages to ride over the skeptical grumbling of your conscious mind. 

That has a lot to do with Ms. Lauper (who, though she did appear on Broadway in the 2006 “Threepenny Opera,” is not in this show). From the time she soared to fame with the album “She’s So Unusual“ in 1983, Ms. Lauper has been known as the ultimate tough but vulnerable misfit, bright and hard on the outside but with a sweet and melting center. Unlike her more commercially savvy coeval Madonna, Ms. Lauper has held on to the same goofy image throughout her career, and, equally unlike Madonna, she has always seemed to sing from the heart.

That sincerity comes through in “Kinky Boots.” So does the defiant quirkiness that made even Ms. Lauper’s gooier recordings palatable. The leading players here — notably Stark Sands, Billy Porter and Annaleigh Ashford — pick up on the trademark Lauper mix of sentimentality and eccentricity, but each makes it his or her own.

Under Mr. Mitchell’s precise and affectionate direction, they do what you want performers in musicals to do: they define specific characters by the way they sing and move. From their entrances, the cast members build up a bank of good vibrations. This is fortunate, since we’ll need to cash in those vibes in the show’s second half, when the preachier aspects of Mr. Fierstein’s script take over, and all the clichés stand naked before you.

Inspired by the little-seen 2005 movie of the same title, “Kinky Boots” is assembled from plot parts that have shown up all too frequently during the past decades in shows that were also based on films. Like “The Full Monty” (choreographed by Mr. Mitchell) and “Billy Elliot the Musical,” it is set in a hard-times British factory town, where jobs are in jeopardy and spirits need lifting. Like “La Cage aux Folles” and “Priscilla Queen of the Desert,” it presents drag queens as the show’s official spirit lifters.

And like “Hairspray,” the musical this production most resembles in tone, “Kinky Boots” is about finding your passion, overcoming prejudice and transcending stereotypes. Never mind that this plot formula has become a flaming stereotype all by itself.

In this case, the character in need of spiritual direction is Charlie Price (Mr. Sands), an heir to a venerable, money-hemorrhaging shoe factory in Northampton who longs to escape the provinces and join upwardly striving London with his status-conscious fiancée, Nicola (Celina Carvajal).

But when the senior Price (Stephen Berger) dies, Charlie is forced to reinvent the business, its product and himself. His guide in this transformation? Lola (Mr. Porter), a strapping drag performer whom Charlie meets by chance. It’s Lola who makes Charlie realize that there’s an untapped niche market: cross-dressers who need well-made footwear.

Don’t ponder the business logistics of this idea. In fact, it won’t do to ponder much of anything in the plot. But the point is that during the first act, you’re not allowed to ponder, as you’re confronted with a dialectic that could happen only in musicals: provincial conservatives (that’s Charlie and his employees) meet their antithesis, a troupe of flamboyant drag queens (that’s Lola and her backup girls, the Angels). And the synthesis? Liberation and justice for all, along with the realization that though you can’t judge a book by its cover, a cover with sequins and feathers is usually better than a plain one.

The production reaches its high point in two late first-act numbers, in which shoe folk meet show folk. (David Rockwell is the designer of the charming storybook set.) Lola and her Angels give Charlie and company a lesson in aesthetics, via a song with brisk and nifty lyrics called “Sex Is in the Heel.”

It’s the mounting pulse of Ms. Lauper’s music and Mr. Mitchell’s wittily illustrative choreography that sends the number soaring. Then the production improbably tops itself with a first-act closer that makes inspired use of an assembly-line belt and introduces the title characters.

Yes, I mean the boots (and how could I not have mentioned the costume designer, Gregg Barnes?), which are big red scene stealers. That we keep our eyes on the cast has to do with the care that has been taken to give each ensemble member a specific identity. (And how great to have a chorus line with such an assortment of body types.)

Mr. Porter’s role is the human equivalent of those boots, but he gives Lola enough snap and sinew to make her more than just another glamazon with biceps. Mr. Sands (“Journey’s End,” “American Idiot”) is terrific, finding strains of rock ’n’ roll agony in a tabula rasa part. And Ms. Ashford, as the factory girl who falls for the boss, creates a completely detailed portrait, which charmingly suggests an earthy British variation on Ms. Lauper (who has written satisfyingly characterful solos for Mr. Sands and Ms. Ashford).

There are some perfectly good songs in the second act, too, but here the script is ascendant, and “Kinky Boots” is far better at walking than talking. The sticky, sermonizing side of Mr. Fierstein — evident in parts of his book for “La Cage” and even in his breakthrough play, “Torch Song Trilogy” — casts its holy glow, and it is not a flattering light. Let me give you one little taste of what to expect: a dejected Lola sings an anthem of love and respect in a nursing home to a man in a wheelchair, who turns out to be ... .

Oh, well. The show recovers its first-act zip and zeal with its finale, “Raise You Up/Just Be,” one of the best curtain numbers since “You Can’t Stop the Beat” sent “Hairspray” audiences dancing out of the theater. If your memory is forgiving, that’s what you’ll take away from “Kinky Boots,” along with that first-act anatomy of the irresistible sex appeal of a perilously high heel.

Kinky Boots

Book by Harvey Fierstein; music and lyrics by Cyndi Lauper, based on the Miramax motion picture “Kinky Boots,” written by Geoff Deane and Tim Firth; directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell; music supervision, arrangements and orchestrations by Stephen Oremus; sets by David Rockwell; costumes by Gregg Barnes; lighting by Kenneth Posner; sound by John Shivers; hair design by Josh Marquette; makeup design by Randy Houston Mercer; associate choreographer, Rusty Mowery; music director, Brian Usifer; music coordinator, Michael Keller; technical supervisor, Christopher C. Smith; production stage manager, Lois L. Griffing; associate producer, Amuse Inc.; general manager, Foresight Theatrical/Aaron Lustbader. Presented by Daryl Roth, Hal Luftig, James L. Nederlander, Terry Allen Kramer, Independent Presenters Network, CJ E&M, Jyne Baron Sherman, Just for Laughs Theatricals/Judith Ann Abrams, Yasuhiro Kawana, Jane Bergère, Allan S. Gordon and Adam S. Gordon, Ken Davenport, Hunter Arnold, Lucy and Phil Suarez, Bryan Bantry, Ron Fierstein and Dorsey Regal, Jim Kierstead/Gregory Rae, BB Group/Christina Papagjika, Michael DeSantis/Patrick Baugh, Brian Smith/Tom and Connie Walsh, Warren Trepp and Jujamcyn Theaters. At the Al Hirschfeld Theater, 302 West 45th Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200, telecharge.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.
WITH: Stark Sands (Charlie Price), Billy Porter (Lola), Annaleigh Ashford (Lauren), Celina Carvajal (Nicola), Daniel Stewart Sherman (Don) and Marcus Neville (George).