Cyndi Lauper Says Farewell To Touring But Not To Her Art Or Advocacy (Cover Story)

When Cyndi Lauper met hip-hop star Nicki Minaj, she learned just how influential and relevant her breakout hit, 1983’s “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” is for generations of young girls.

“I have fought for my whole life for inclusion, and in the video the girls are inclusive, and it’s what New York looked like!” Lauper says. “I sang it with Nicki Minaj one time, and I didn’t realize she was one of the little girls that saw the ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’ video. She saw herself and said, ‘I can do that too!’ And now that little girl is Nicki Minaj!”

Not just a native New Yorker but, by now, a citizen of the world, Lauper earned her distinctive voice as a Brooklyn-born, Queens-raised girl whose rapid-fire, non-rhotic linguistic gymnastics are sometimes broken up only by bursts of laughter when she says something that amuses her, which is often.

A 2024 documentary now streaming on Paramount+, “Let The Canary Sing,” details her childhood and sometimes bumpy road to stardom.

Lauper is still having fun as she prepares to wind down her touring career with her “Girls Just Want To Have Fun Farewell Tour” that begins Oct. 18 at the Bell Centre in Montreal. So far, the tour is routed through 34 cities in North America and Europe, with dates in Oceania and Asia expected to be announced.

“Girls Just Want To Have Fun Farewell Tour” will mark the first global headlining tour for Lauper since “The Detour Tour” in 2016-17 and, surprisingly, her first global arena tour.

Her last major tour was in support of longtime friend Rod Stewart in 2017-18, including a sold-out, two-night engagement at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles June 25-26, 2018, that moved 32,720 tickets and grossed $3,753,185. They sold out NYC’s Madison Square Garden two months later with an attendance of 12,534 and $1,560,883 gross. She’s performed at numerous festivals, including Glastonbury, Stagecoach, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, Global Citizen, and staged her own annual holiday benefit, “Cyndi Lauper: Home For The Holidays.” In 2024, she returned to Glastonbury and appeared Sept. 20 at Rock In Rio in Brazil.

After years of performing in support of artists and friends including Cher, Tina Turner, Rod Stewart, Boy George and his former band Culture Club, Lauper is going out on her own terms and with a production that seems long overdue but may be right on time.

“I did get a phone call from her, and her lawyer at one point said, ‘Hey, what do you think about doing this [tour]?’” says Steve Herman, senior vice president of touring for Live Nation. “I went home and started researching and looking at the numbers, looking at Pollstar reports and things like that. And I couldn’t figure out where she did a real tour. I called back the next morning and I said, ‘I really want to do this tour.’

“I had forgotten how impactful she was at so many times in her career on different levels,” Herman continues. “She’s always loved by artists, and I feel like she hasn’t been given the opportunity to be where she was in my mind. And I said, ‘Well, I think she should do a big tour and I want to do it. We just have to figure out how we’re going to market this to make it big.’ And he came back to me, said, ‘Well, she thinks she wants it to be the farewell tour.’”

Marketing got a boost with the release of “Let The Canary Sing,” and Lauper’s stature over the years has grown to the point where her fans now span generations.

When it’s all over, Lauper may have retired from touring but will still have a full calendar through at least 2028, as she focuses on bringing a musical production of “Working Girl” to Broadway, along with other passion projects, not the least of which include her two nonprofits, True Colors United and Girls Just Want To Have FUNdamental Rights, and work with other advocacy programs like She Is The Music.

“Oh, yes. No more packing, unpacking, parking on the right, buses on the left, no more of that,” Lauper emphatically, almost gleefully, says. “No more getting up in the middle of the night going to the hotel desk, ‘Can you move that sofa and vacuum underneath it so I can put my suitcases and my trunks somewhere?’ It’s hard to take everything with you! I miss my dogs, but I’m not going to [bring them on tour] because they wouldn’t like it! [laughs].”

Lauper has been a solo performer for more than 40 years, and for about 10 years prior that, including with her band Blue Angel. She began her solo career as the eponymous pop star that a juvenescent MTV so famously amplified at just the right moment in 1983. She released “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” from her massive, debut hit album She’s So Unusual, filled with hits like “Money Changes Everything,” “She Bop,” “All Through The Night,” and “Time After Time.”

The multi-colored hair, the mix-and-match aesthetic of vintage beads and baubles, spangles, hats, feather boas, lacy skirts and corsets-as-outerwear on display in the memorable “Girls’” video made a statement about personal freedom, feminism and expression young girls (and their moms and dads) weren’t used to seeing in the pre-MTV era. And it was all her own style, not the product of a video stylist.

“I love vintage,” Lauper says of her long-ago favored fashion. “I don’t wear a lot of vintage now because when I was wearing it, it was a yin/yang thing, young people wearing old dresses. Now, it’s just yang, ya know what I mean? Now it would just be old women in old dresses! [more laughter]”

Though her personal style has evolved, Lauper remains a fashion icon and continues to personify her first big hit with the same sense of joy on display in the famed 40-year-old video starring her mom, professional wrestler Captain Lou Albano and a cast of friends, of every size and shade, dancing around New York City with her.

You can still clearly hear the girl in her voice at age 71. But Lauper acknowledges that she’s reached the limit of the physical demands of performing and touring at the level that fans rightly expect and she expects from herself. She’ll more than make up for it with a vibrant, thoughtful show Lauper is building with the help of creative director Brian Burke and his team of designers.

“I’m really grateful and happy and fortunate that Cyndi Lauper and her manager, Lisa Barbaris, picked me to do this because it’s really special,” Burke says. “I just want to give her an amazing show that she deserves, and her fans deserve to see. So we’ve been working very intimately together on what her vision is and how I can bring my vision to it and how I can help her shape that, where she feels that she is getting the tour that she and her fans want to have. So it’s really been a great process so far.”

Samantha Kirby Yoh, partner and co-head of global music at United Talent Agency, has worked with Lauper in different capacities since she was an assistant to former agent Jonny Podell, then with WME and Lauper’s one-time agent. But even before that, she remembers first becoming aware of Cyndi Lauper, seeing her on television as a kid growing up in England.

“I think it was on TV and ‘Top of the Pops,’” Kirby Yoh reminisces. “It was like, ‘Wow, what is this hurricane that is coming towards us, of color and songs and happiness and fun?’ I remember that was the first time that I was blown away by her.”

Now, she’s helping Lauper not only book her final tour but works with her on projects like She Is The Music. The team has also announced an all-women support lineup for the farewell tour that includes Aly and AJ, Daya, Emily Estefan, Gayle, LU KALA, Elle King, Trixie Mattel, Rêve, Amanda Shires and Tones And I.

“There’s such a celebration and a joy Cyndi brings,” Kirby Yoh says. “She has put together a truly fantastic, extravagant show that is her arena tour. She’s really selling great tickets everywhere – she sold out Madison Square Garden Oct. 30 – and she’s bringing an all-female lineup, as well. She is always bringing the fun into it. The celebration of being female, the celebration of life. She is always pulling people up and supporting people all the way.”

That philosophy of lifting people up could also apply to Barbaris, who began working for Lauper as a publicist in the 1990s.

“She hates when I tell this story, but I was her publicist in the ‘90s and she fired me,” Barbaris explains with a chuckle. “But I came back to work on [12 Deadly Cyns…And Then Some] and Sisters of Avalon after that, and then her Merry Christmas … Have A Nice Life album. I started managing her when she put out Shine (2002). So we’ve been together a long time.”

And that includes Lauper’s foray into musical theater. Lauper first tested the waters with a role as Jenny in “The Threepenny Opera” in 2006 and, by 2010, was sought out by legendary actor, playwright and screenwriter Harvey Fierstein to write music and lyrics for an adaption of “Kinky Boots” for Broadway.

Lauper won a Tony Award for Best Original Score (the first female solo writer to do so) as the production racked up six wins in 2013 including for Best Musical and Best Actor for Billy Porter, whom Lauper cast in his first major Broadway role. “Kinky Boots” ran on Broadway until 2019 and has since been produced worldwide; a future film adaptation is reportedly being considered.

So when Lauper says she is “retiring from touring,” that’s exactly what she means. She by no means intends to “retire” in any conventional sense.

“Oh, hell no!” she says, laughing before turning serious. “I’m bringing ‘Working Girl The Musical’ for an opening in 2025 at the La Jolla Playhouse (a West Coast venue known to ready productions for the Great White Way). And then it’s coming to Broadway in the spring of 2026. I’ve been working on that since 2013, since I was hired. So it’s been a while now, and these things take a lot of time.”

And the play intersects well with another of Lauper’s passions: she’s long been a social justice advocate for equality for women and members of the LGBTQ+ community and sees “Working Girl” as a necessarily artistic vehicle.

“This one I have to get right,” she says of ‘Working Girl.’ “It’s very important in this time and age for young women, for audiences and for women in general.”

Issues of equality may be, of all of Lauper’s many passions, the one that has consumed most of her life, going back to her girlhood in New York. It’s not limited to women’s rights; inspired by her sister Ellen, Lauper has become a leading ally to the LGBTQ+ community, appearing at Pride celebrations and parades, raising awareness and money for causes including youth homelessness, which is the focus of her True Colors United nonprofit foundation.

Lauper established another effort, the Girls Just Want To Have FUNdamental Rights Fund, in 2022 as a donor-advised fund at the Tides Foundation to support efforts that advance women’s rights and health.

Lauper’s current concern is getting out the vote – regardless of who it’s for – in the fall U.S. general election. She is passionate on the subject, but notably focused on issues, not personalities or partisan politics. She says the “Girls Just Want To Have Fun Farewell Tour” is going to be a space for fun, inclusion and happiness – politics, not so much. It’s going to be for making some dreams come true.

“It’s going to be amazing,” Lauper says. “It’s going to be a lot of fun. Oh my gosh. I mean, I’m trying to work out wigs for everybody who comes so that everybody can have their own! I have everything to size. I’m so excited! You see? [laughs]”