The smash hit Broadway musical Kinky Boots – hotfoot (sorry!) from a three-year West End run – hits Oxford on a first national tour and sets happy audiences dancing in the aisles.

Feelgood entertainment at its finest is provided in Cyndi Lauper’s tuneful take on an acclaimed movie from 2005 which, strange to tell, took its inspiration from a BBC TV documentary aired 20 years ago.

This told the tale – refined in Harvey Fierstein’s book – of a Northampton shoe company that reinvented itself in search of new business.

After a downturn in demand for its traditional brogues and Oxfords, it moves into a different market in footwear for men, with high-stepping drag queens – a group exemplified by its new designer Lola – as its customer base.

Thus are neatly introduced two threads with a winning pedigree in stage entertainment. Dancer Lola and his six attendant Angels, great lookers all, are firmly in the tradition established in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, La Cage aux Folles and, of course, The Rocky Horror Show.

Footwear, meanwhile, has inspired a notable back-catalogue, including Cinderella with her glass slipper and those never-let-up Red Shoes.

The show could come over plot-wise as a load of old cobblers, to borrow the nick-name of Northampton’s football club, but on the whole it hangs together well.

We certainly meet an engaging (and strong voiced) male lead in Charles Price, as portrayed by Joel Harper-Jackson. Recently graduated from uni, he is forced to take on the family business after his father’s sudden death.

This is bad news for tough-cookie girlfriend Nicola (Helen Ternent), whose eye is on life in London. Clearly their romance is on the skids, leaving a possible opening for the smitten Lauren (Paula Lane), one of Price’s loyal workers, all nicely drawn, especially by Demitri Lampra as the macho Don.

Or could Charlie team up with sassy, straight talking Lola, sensationally performed by Kayi Ushe? Wait and see.

On the way, there are great tunes, disco and heart-tugging, and a message that boils down, I guess, to Polonius’s advice in Hamlet: “To thine own self be true.”

Until Saturday. 4/5

0844 8713020, atgtickets.com/oxford