Cyndi Lauper about saying goodbye with panache during the farewell tour

Cyndi Lauper says goodbye to the life of a touring musician as the Girls just want to have a nice farewell tour travels to downtown Phoenix for a Footprint Center concert on Tuesday, November 19, one of 23 stops the tour will make en route to a final concert in Chicago on December 5.

And it feels great.

“It’s not that I don’t like performing,” Lauper says. “I just don’t like packing. I don’t like carrying around.”

Lauper has put together a dream team of sorts to bring her vision for the farewell tour to life.

“It’s a bucket list tour,” she says. “I have an amazing artistic director, Brian Burke, who helps me achieve things I only dreamed of. Visually it is beautiful. We collaborate with Yayoi Kusama and her beautiful works of art, and with Daniel Wurtzel and his living art.”

For those who may not be familiar with Kusama’s artwork, the artist’s infinite mirror room: “You who are obliterated in the dancing flock of fireflies”, is perhaps the Phoenix Art Museum’s most beloved installation.

Cyndi Lauper’s farewell tour is inspired by the documentary ‘Let the Canary Sing’

The timing of the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Tour was inspired in part by the making of “Let the Canary Sing,” an Alison Ellwood documentary about Lauper’s career that premiered June 4 on Paramount+.

“The documentary came out,” says Lauper. “And I thought I might as well do a farewell tour and say goodbye with a lot of panache, you know?”

For the past eight years, Lauper has collaborated with Rob Hyman of the Hooters, her collaborator on her first of two Billboard Hot 100 chart-toppers, “Time After Time,” on the score of a musical version of “Working Girl,” a film from 1988 starring Melanie Griffith and Sigourney Weaver.

“’Working Girl’ goes to La Jolla (California Playhouse) in the fall of ’25 and then opens on Broadway in the spring of ’26,” says Lauper.

“So I worked on it for about eight years. It’s a long time. And I think if I waited until after ‘Working Girl,’ it would be too late for me, because right now I’m strong. I can do it. You want to do things while you still can.”

Although this tour will mean an end to all the hustle and bustle, Lauper says she has no plans to leave music behind.

“I can still perform, you know,” she says. “But I’ve been writing ‘Working Girl’ stuff for so long, it’s not like I’m not making music, because I am.”

She contacted Hyman because ‘Working Girl’ would be set in the ’80s.

And as Lauper says, “I thought, ‘You and I were in the ’80s. Let’s do this.’ I also work with Sammy James Jr. from the Mooney Suzuki. And I also had Salt from Salt-N-Pepa write a rap for one of the songs because it was from the 80s.”

How Cyndi Lauper Made Her Way to Broadway With ‘Kinky Boots’

“Working Girl” is Lauper’s second musical.

She wrote the music and lyrics for ‘Kinky Boots’ and won a Tony Award for Best Original Score in 2013. The musical won five other Tonys, including Best New Musical. In 2014, Lauper received a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album for the cast recording. And in 2016, the West End production in London won Best New Musical at the Laurence Olivier Awards.

She had previously been approached to collaborate on a musical.

“James Lapine called in ’93 and wanted me to do something,” Lauper says. “But at that moment it was my ‘Hat Full of Stars’ record, which was very important to me, and I had been waiting for it for years. So I had to refuse.”

The star was fresh off a European tour for “Bring Ya to the Brink” when Harvey Fierstein, who wrote the book for “Kinky Boots,” reached out to see if she would be interested in working with him on a musical.

“When Harvey called, I had just finished the Bring Ya to the Brink tour and I was like, ‘Okay, you know, sure,’” she says.

“Because it was a lot of hustling and proving yourself and because I was doing this dance album, they said, ‘Well, you’re not rock ‘n’ roll.’ And I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? You’re kidding me.’ I just got tired of the gatekeepers. And I like to tell stories, and I think the stories were important to tell.”

Cyndi Lauper saw ‘Kinky Boots’ as an extension of her activism

Lauper also saw the musical’s theme of overcoming prejudice as an extension of the work she did through True Colors United, a nonprofit organization she founded in 2008 that focuses on the experiences of LGBT youth, who Make up 40% of the homeless youth population in the United States.

In 2022, Lauper sang “True Colors,” her second hit to top the Hot 100, as President Joe Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law. That same year, Lauper launched the Girls Just Want to Have Fundamental Rights Fund.

Lauper announced the initiative on October 11, 2022, the International Day of the Girl, in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

During the 2016 marches, she remembers seeing young women holding signs that read, “Girls just want to have fundamental rights.”

“So I thought to myself, I said, ‘My God, we have to help. This is where you step on,” she remembers. “So I stepped up. And we raised money for women’s health, for safe and legal abortions, so that women can have autonomy over themselves, because as a woman, I don’t like to be a second-class citizen, and I don’t like to be tended to to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” because that’s what happens.

That’s why your voice is so important, says Lauper.

“We live in a country where we can vote. In some countries this is not possible. And I believe that as a woman you pay equal taxes, without equal rights. That’s not right,” she says.

How Cyndi Lauper Claimed ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ for Women

The name of Lauper’s farewell tour is taken from the title of her breakthrough single “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” a song she had no interest in recording after hearing the demo from the man who wrote it, Robert Hazard.

As written, Hazard’s song was in no danger of being considered a feminist anthem. Until Lauper flipped the script.

“Well, it was written from a man’s perspective, and I didn’t see what it had to do with me,” she says.

“And then they said, ‘Well, it could be a girl song. You could do that.’ So I pulled out the things that were very specific to his story. Because what made it bigger was making it a girl’s story, you know? And the rest is her story.”

Besides the fact that the bridge will be lost, the changes are mainly a matter of perspective. In Hazard’s version, he is out all night and gets hell from his mother because “these girls just want to have fun.”

In Lauper’s version, she tells her parents to take it easy and let her live the life she wants to live because when the work day is over, girls just want to have fun.

And changing the line that follows “Some boys take a pretty girl and hide her from the rest of the world” from Hazard’s “All my girls have to walk in the sun” (as if he’s feeling good about how generous he is to allow such a thing) to Lauper’s “I wanna be the one to walk in the sun” changes the entire tone of that verse.

When ‘She’s So Unusual’ made Cyndi Lauper a star

“Girls Just Want to Have Fun” was the first of five Top 40 singles from “She’s So Unusual,” the debut album that positioned Lauper as a cultural phenomenon, followed by “Time After Time,” “She Bop,” “All Through the night” and “Money changes everything.”

“It was interesting because, especially when I was in college and fell in love with vintage clothing and wanted to be a painter, I came back to Queens and people were throwing rocks at me because of the way I dressed,” she says. “And when I became famous, people started dressing like me.”

She laughs and adds, “My clothes and all that stuff, it wasn’t artificial. That was something that I liked and that I came up with and that I felt was uniquely mine. I didn’t think other people would start dressing like me.”

She remembers an angry encounter with a woman at a drugstore in New York City’s Sutton Place neighborhood.

“This woman looked me up and down and said, ‘What are you wearing?’” Lauper says.

“And I was so angry. I said, ‘This? Oh, this is what your daughter is going to wear next year.” And I just left and got in the car. But I had no idea. Then my mother called me on Halloween. I forgot where I was, Australia or somewhere else. And she told me that every child who rang the doorbell was dressed like me.

It’s been 41 years since ‘She’s So Unusual’ made her a star and had kids trick-or-treating in her image, and Lauper is excited to say goodbye to those fans with a tour that’s all about the fun that girls want.

“This tour is for fun, to bring people together and be joyful and really have a good time,” Lauper said.

“I actually have all different colored wigs and I try to make them very cheaply so that we can have a party. Can you imagine how much fun that would be? We will all have colored hair.

“It will be funny for people. It will be moving. I think people will leave very happy. I want to thank everyone for all the twists and turns that I have been through and for everyone who follows me.”

Cyndi Lauper Girls just want to have a fun farewell tour

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday, November 19.

Where: Footprint Center, 201 E. Jefferson St., Phoenix.

Recognition: $34.50 and up.

Details: 602-379-7800, ticketmaster.com.

Ed has covered pop music for The Republic since 2007, reviewing festivals and concerts, interviewing legends, covering the local scene and more. He did the same thing in Pittsburgh for more than a decade. Follow him on X and Instagram @edmasley and on Facebook as Ed Masley. Email him at [email protected].