By PRIA DAHIYA
Pria Dahiya is currently a Critical Insight fellow at Pittsburgh Public Theater, in partnership with American Theatre magazine.
Degenerative genetic disorders, alcoholism, New Jersey. Not the standard fare in a feel-good musical comedy.
The ironic juxtaposition between tragic circumstances and campy, upbeat theatricality is the premise upon which the world of Kimberly Akimbo – whose national tour runs through March 9 at the Benedum Center – is built.
As Leo Tolstoy put it so aptly in Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The particular unhappiness of the Levaco family is that their daughter, our protagonist Kimberly (Carolee Carmello), is on the brink of her 16th birthday and has the appearance of a 60-year-old woman. A genetic disorder causes her to age at four times the normal rate. She wants to experience everything before it’s too late, whether it’s travelling to a safari or simply having a real home-cooked dinner with her family.
(Image: Joan Marcus)
This may seem like a simple request, but Kimberly’s father, Buddy (Jim Hogan), is a devoted drunk and Kimberly’s mother, Pattie (Laura Woyasz), is pregnant and inattentive, both her arms immobilized by casts from carpal-tunnel surgeries. To top it all off, there’s Kimberly’s crude, loud Aunt Debra (Emily Koch), who crashes back into the Levacos’ lives with criminal schemes.
The ensemble fills in the world of the show. Grace Capeless, Darron Hayes, Skye Alyssa Friedman and Pierce Wheeler play Delia, Martin, Teresa and Aaron, a group of nerdy, show-choir teens locked in an unrequited crush quadrangle.
The show opens on Kimberly and the ensemble at the local Skater Planet rink, where the anagram-loving, tuba-toting Seth (Justin Cooley) works the counter. Seth also comes from a dysfunctional and absent family, and his awkward straightforwardness matches Kimberly’s own. While his candid questions about Kimberly’s condition initially catch her off guard, they rapidly develop feelings for each other, with a cringy cuteness that pays off dividends.
It’s hard to find fault with a show that tries, and often succeeds, at being optimistic and life-affirming. Unfortunately, this was not enough to make up for a premise that eventually disappoints. The deeper messages in the story are undermined by the unrelenting topsy-turvy world of the play, where adults act like children and children look like adults, and fatal and gruesome diseases are sung about in bright melodies. If the material leaned further into the dark comedy, there may have been catharsis and articulation of grief.
Carmello’s singing was beautiful, and her voice was carefully pitched to sound convincingly young in scenes. It is not the actor’s fault that Kimberly only represents the idea of an illness and not its reality, which is never really confronted.
Maybe that would be okay if the story didn’t also progress along the well-trodden course of quirky coming-of-age narratives, lacking major reversals. I consistently chuckled at the characters saying exactly how they felt the moment they felt it, but this convention removed most suspense from the narrative.
Jessica Stone‘s direction, Danny Mefford‘s choreography, and David Zinn’s scenic design were similarly unsubtle. Stylistically, this suited the material. The flying flats and smooth automation impressed me, but still I craved more moments of simple and satisfying theatricality, such as in the number “Happy for Her”.
As Kim, Seth and Buddy drive to school, each bump, brake and bounce of the car is shared across all the characters’ physicalities. This was a seemingly simple choice, but it packed in the broad physical humor I craved to see in almost every number, not just a handful.
“Happy for Her” was an overall standout number. Sung by Hogan’s Buddy, it has a frantic pitter-patter, back-and-forth as he wrestles with feelings of happiness and protectiveness over Kimberly. If only her fatal disease was treated with the same level of introspective monologue as her crush on a boy
Another standout was “Better,” sung by Emily Koch as Debra. The lyrics “I met a nice guy / At the dog track / He was tall, he was Greek / He was possibly gay / He needed a green card / I needed the cash / We got married in Passaic last May,” killed me on sight. Koch’s boisterous, Melissa McCarthy-esque physical humor cranked her scenes up a notch.
Kimberly Akimbo’s score is by Jeanine Tesori, the composer par excellence of dysfunctional families. The book is by David Lindsay-Abaire, who wrote a 2001 play of the same title upon which the 2021 musical was based. It’s easy to understand how Tesori was attracted to the themes of Kimberly Akimbo when you look at her earlier works, such as the Tony Award-winning Fun Home and the Olivier Award-winning Caroline, Or Change, both of which explore intergenerational family dynamics and individuals on the margins of society.
However, the score of Kimberly Akimbo lacks the psychological and musical depth of the two works listed above. The score delivered standard musical-theater fare, but lacked clear reference to the music of any particular time period or place. The program tells me it is set in 1999, New Jersey, but the music indicates nothing of the sort.
This is forgivable, as the lyrics are brilliant. Tesori and Abaire write lines rich with turns of phrase, thick with jokes. When Kimberly sings “Getting older is my affliction / Getting older is your cure” in Act Two’s “Our Disease,” her character seemed to be on the brink of a profound revelation about mortality. A revelation that was never fully realized, but that’s OK.
Not every performance needs to change one’s life, but I always hope to leave the theater more energized than when I entered it. I did not feel that way, but I can certainly imagine that there are vast audiences who will find comfort, solace and joy in a piece like this. For instance, it is the perfect musical to bring my parents to, and for that, I commend Kimberly Akimbo.
Pria Dahiya is a theater director, multimedia artist and arts critic based in PittsburghmYou can find her work at www.priadahiya.com and on instagram at @pria.emmy.
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