Kelly Marie Tran rose to the occasion in Kinky Boots

Now a century old, the Hollywood Bowl offers a dizzying array of performances from rock and pop to classical and opera, and each summer a musical is staged. This year it’s the turn of Kinky Boots, and amongst the cast is a very familiar face who has spent some considerable time in the UK, hence her skill with the accent – Kelly Marie Tran.

In its 100-year history, the Hollywood Bowl has played host to everything from jazz concerts to rock bands to lovesick crooners. But each year, once a summer, they return to an annual tradition of staging a musical.

This year it is Cyndi Lauper and Harvey Fierstein’s ode to authenticity and individuality, Kinky Boots. The Tony winner ran for seven years on Broadway and made a star of Billy Porter, and this new iteration at the Bowl proves why it’s a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.

The real surprise, though, is Kelly Marie Tran, best known as Rose Tico in the Star Wars franchise. Tran channels the can-do attitude of Rose into Lauren, a factory worker, with aplomb. But she also lends her an infectious, bubbly goofiness. Her impossible-to-contain thirst earns well-deserved laughs, and her power ballad, “The History of Wrong Guys,” is Boots’ standout number. Tran is still a fresh face in the industry, but her work here makes the case for casting her in many more musicals and comedies. (And her British accent is the strongest in the cast!)

Kinky Boots is set in England, and the dialect work here ranges from the precision of Renee Zellweger in the Bridget Jones movies to the jarring caricature of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. These productions are generally put together within a head-spinningly brief rehearsal period, but some of these actors could’ve used more time with a dialect coach. Yet that’s hardly the point when the show is meant to get the audience dancing in their seats on a balmy summer night.

It’s always struck me as strange that the Bowl does this each year when most Broadway shows are crafted with a house of 500-odd people in mind at most. The Bowl holds 17,500 people — and it’s easy for the nuances of a musical theater performance, especially choreography or dialogue-heavy scenes, to get lost in its cavernous amphitheater. Some shows are more successful than others at bridging that gap, and Kinky Boots is on the high end of the scale, using its upbeat, pop-infused score and Brady’s effervescent, larger-than-life performance to reach to the top of the Hollywood hills.

There’s another Star Wars connection in Kinky Boots, with the 2005 original starring Joel Edgerton, recently back as Uncle Owen in Obi-Wan Kenobi.