Review: ‘Kimberly Akimbo,’ Both Great and Small, Seizes the Day
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Broadway reliably churns out several tourist-bait extravaganzas a year, the kind that feature sequins, singalongs and profits. Smallish, thoughtful, more narrowcast new musicals — let’s call them nerdicals — are rarer: one per season, if we’re lucky. Some, like “Fun Home,” “Dear Evan Hansen” and “The Band’s Visit,” win top Tony Awards; “A Strange Loop” even won the Pulitzer Prize. If they rarely last as long as, say, “Six” or “Moulin Rouge” seem likely to, these shows prove their immense value in the time they’ve got.
That may well be the fate of “Kimberly Akimbo,” the profoundly funny and heartbreaking new nerdical that opened on Thursday at the Booth Theater. In any case, it’s the plot. Born with a fatal aging disorder akin to progeria, Kimberly Levaco (Victoria Clark) is a 15-year-old girl whose body resembles that of a woman well into her 70s. Knowing she will not live much beyond 16, she wants to experience everything she imagines the world has to offer — road trips, a robot butler, puppy love — while she can. The value of her life cannot be measured by how long it lasts, any more than the show’s can by how long it runs.
Which is not to say she or it is a downer. Far from it: Though an underground river of sorrow gives “Kimberly Akimbo” its keenness, the surface is shiny comedy.
That was already the case in the play by David Lindsay-Abaire on which it is based, a play that begins, as the musical does, with a visual joke: a grown-looking woman, outside a skating rink, dressed like a teenager and nibbling a candy necklace. That’s upbeat Kimberly, as usual trying to make the best of life’s bad situation. And now, with the addition of songs (music by Jeanine Tesori; lyrics by Lindsay-Abaire) that turn the carpe diem dial to maximum, the director Jessica Stone has turned up the hilarity dial as well, to keep all that emotion in balance.
Clark is responsible for the carpe diem part, and it need hardly be said if you saw her Tony Award-winning performance in “The Light in the Piazza” in 2005 that her singing is phenomenally rich and specific.
But what has become even richer since “Kimberly Akimbo” premiered at the Atlantic Theater Company last year is her profound and uncritical immersion in youthfulness. Leaving the ironies to us, she refuses to condescend to the character. There is nothing in quotation marks about her teenage mannerisms, or embarrassing about seeing her, at 63, wear the spot-on embroidered jumpers and colorful hair clips Sarah Laux has costumed her in.
Even when she shares an awkward kiss with a classmate named Seth Weetis — played by the completely adorable 19-year-old Justin Cooley — humor is the top note, sweetness the body, pathos just an aftertaste. Her overprotective father needn’t worry about her getting pregnant, she reminds him, because she went through menopause four years ago.
All the jokes work that way. The extreme hypochondria of Kimberly’s mother (Alli Mauzey) allows for a can-you-top-this arc as she acquires additional ailments: funny until you clock that with both arms in casts, she can’t eat. (In a neat parent-child reversal, Kimberly must feed her.) Nor is her father (Steven Boyer) any more capable; when he finally gives her a present she actually wants — passes to Great Adventure — they’re expired. And in the basement, Aunt Debra (Bonnie Milligan), a grifter with big attitude and little conscience, is concocting a check-forging scheme.
To these five characters, all in the play, the musical adds four others, high school classmates of Kimberly and Seth who in the Atlantic production sometimes seemed to be borrowed from “Glee.” They are so desperate to finance their show choir costumes that they agree to be Debra’s accomplices.
But among many smart adjustments made to the show for Broadway, the four schoolmates (Olivia Elease Hardy, Fernell Hogan, Michael Iskander, Nina White) have been incorporated more clearly and fully as a kind of Geek Chorus. Aside from providing B-story contrast, they underline a theme I hadn’t really noticed before: the gumption of outcasts. No matter how much life wants to sideline them, they insist on having the spotlight, and even the sequins.
That the musical in essence does the same for the rest of the characters is one of its most unusual qualities. Each is beautifully portrayed in songs that give the actors a chance to shine. Milligan has the most obvious showstoppers, one per act, in which she introduces her crew of goody-goodies — now including Kimberly and Seth — to the thrilling anarchy of selfishness.
“Good Kid” is in fact the name of one of Seth’s numbers, which Cooley, in a flawless Broadway debut, delivers with charm that does not obscure their ruminative, perseverative nature. (“The bookworm. The boy scout. The good son,” he sings. “What has it gotten me?”) In another, a duet with Kimberly, he cranks out possible anagrams of her name in real time. (“My Blacker Olive!”) Even the parents are given chances to redeem themselves in song.
I’ve written often about Tesori’s chameleonic brilliance, the way — in shows as distinctive as “Fun Home,” “Caroline, or Change” and “Shrek” — she seems to have at her disposal an infinite thesaurus of musical styles so that each setting is as expressive as possible. (The finale of “Kimberly Akimbo,” a ukulele tune inevitably called “Great Adventure,” is a killer, so jaunty you cry.) Yet watching the show again, I focused as much on Lindsay-Abaire’s lyrics, which retain the natural shape of expert dialogue — quirky, characterful and sometimes even leggy — without distorting the song forms or turning everything into operetta.
And of course I focused — you can’t help it — on Clark. So remote from the bellowing divadom of those tourist-bait extravaganzas, that I’m tempted to call what she does not singing at all, but acting on pitch.
And what intelligent acting it is, drawing on everything she knows. Indeed, in her Kimberly I thought I sensed an inversion of her Margaret in “The Light in the Piazza,” a woman whose daughter, because of a physical condition, would never be much more than a child. How odd and enlightening that, now 17 years older, Clark is playing a version of that child herself.
Being a former good kid — and, like Seth, an aficionado of “the puzzleistic arts” — I began to see the character and the show in anagrammatic terms. (Possibly this one: sublime cast = best musical.) As the past and the present interpenetrate in Clark’s performance, you may feel, as I did, the themes of “Kimberly Akimbo” recombining to achieve an even sharper focus. It’s not about a disease at all, unless it’s the one we all have: We grow up too slowly and then suddenly too fast. We are gone (but let’s hope the show isn’t) before we know it.
Kimberly Akimbo
At the Booth Theater, Manhattan; kimberlyakimbothemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes.
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