Kimberly Akimbo
Booth Theatre, New York City ★★★★
Behold “the best musical of the year so far, by far,” said Charles Isherwood in The Wall Street Journal. “Breathtakingly lovely and often riotously funny,” Kimberly Akimbo tells the story of a 15-yearold girl with a progeria-like condition that causes her to age at four to five times the normal rate. She is, in other words, hurtling toward an early death, and “certainly the possibility of strumming over-strenuously at the heartstrings is present.” But David Lindsay-Abaire’s book “blends the sweet, the sad, and the tartly offbeat in ideal dimensions.” Even moments that could be weighed down by sentiment, such as a standout song in which Kimberly writes to the Make-a-Wish Foundation, “remain free of reflexive pathos and are almost always seasoned with humor, making them the musical theater equivalent of salted caramel.”
“A peculiar pleasure in watching Kimberly Akimbo comes from thinking the musical could not possibly pull off what it is trying to accomplish, and being proved wrong,” said Jackson McHenry in NYMag.com. Absurd side elements are quickly piled atop the central drama, including Kimberly’s “kookily self-involved” parents, a Greek chorus of choir students, and a brazenly criminal aunt who ropes the teens into a check-fraud scheme. Jeanine Tesori’s music, picking up the story’s cue, “ranges from imitation Jersey rock to show-tune grandeur to folkie twee.” At some point early on, you’re likely to get nervous, “perhaps just about the degree of difficulty.” But then, suddenly, “the chaos of Kimberly Akimbo clicks into place, and the show reveals that it’s been dealing in simple, unbearable truths all along.”
“It’s a bit like an amusement park ride: Half the fun is knowing your heart is about to get drop-kicked,” said Naveen Kumar in Variety. Sixty-threeyear-old Victoria Clark is
“no less than astonishing” as Kimberly, somehow playing a character nearly a half-century her junior “without coming off as false, affected, or, worst of all, cutesy.” Bonnie Milligan turns Kimberly’s crooked aunt into the show’s “raging comedic force,” while Justin Cooley delivers a breakout performance as Kimberly’s sweet, nerdy high school love interest. Arriving on a Broadway glutted with adaptations of popular movies, Kimberly Akimbo “proves musicals can be deeply strange and spirited, and can challenge audiences to see things from another point of view. Now, isn’t that a worthwhile way to spend our limited time on Earth?”