Time can fly and it has in the cruelest way possible for high schooler Kimberly Levaco.
Turning 16, she is trapped in a body with a genetic aging disease that strikes 1 in 50 million people, so she looks 72. Kimmy is also hemmed in by the most dysfunctional family imaginable and surrounded by high school classmates baffled at her very presence.
What’s equally baffling, then, is how what sounds like the dourest subject matter is transformed into the tremendously heartfelt and intoxicatingly playful musical “Kimberly Akimbo,” now at the Segerstrom Center in Costa Mesa.
Explaining the theater pixie dust glittering about this production starts with its two creative arch-stones, the story and the score.
Twenty-plus years and about 200 yards from the Segerstrom stage, “Kimberly Akimbo” saw its world premiere as a straight play at South Coast Repertory. Of the Manhattan incarnation of playwright David Lindsay-Abaire’s quirky tale, the New York Times wrote, “… a shrewd satire, a black comedy and a heartbreaking study of how time wounds everyone.”
Further time flew. After Broadway composer Jeanine Tesori and Lindsay-Abaire worked together on 2008’s ”Shrek the Musical,” she proposed they collaborate again.
The happy result here is that song by song, Tesori’s engaging, unsentimental pop arrangements entwine perfectly with Lindsay-Abaire’s storytelling and its varying emotional tones.
For instance, in one of the intimate show’s most impactful numbers “The Inevitable Turn,” a buoyant arrangement somehow stays in tune with the show’s bitterest themes as they spill out in ugly acrimony.
Equally good news is that the cast in the touring production adds on an extra layer of excellence.
A veteran of 16 Broadway musicals, actress Carolee Carmelo is masterful in revealing Kimberly’s inner light. Physically declining and socially stunted — a daunting equation: Kimberly is past menopause as her peers reach puberty — Carmelo’s acting channels youthful yearnings while navigating the bleak realities.
These aspects of her searching performance are dazzlingly revealed in the show’s third song, Carmelo’s expressively sung treatment of Kimberly’s letter to the Make-A-Wish foundation.
“Make a Wish,’ asks for both life-expanding adventures — “a fancy cruise with 50 of my closest friends” — but also plaintively reveals that Kimberly’s fantasies include “however normal people live for a day.”
Unexpectedly, Kimberly encounters the personification of tenderness in classmate Seth.
A tuba-playing anagram aficionado — upon acquaintance, he races to rearrange her name into “Cleverly Akimbo” — Seth also night manages Skater Planet, the town’s hangout for kids.
Seth has his own family and personality challenges, but Miguel Gil conveys the role with such earnest hopefulness that the tenderness of the friendship he and Kimberly strike up can’t help but blossom, chastely, into something a bit more.
The show’s most jarring role is definitely Aunt Debra, an amoral fraudster who has done time and is the reason Kimberly, mom and dad moved without a forwarding address. Emily Koch has the voice and amusing/demanding ’tude needed to lead the show’s the most infectious number, the skiff-beat driven “How to Wash a Check.”
Debra’s appearances are always blunt and the personification of startling. Mysteriously, at an early stage of the story, she wordlessly drags a bulky, full-size blue mailbox through the family’s house.
As Pattie the mother (both arms in casts after getting carpal tunnel surgery while pregnant), Dana Steingold has her character’s loopiness down. She also reveals a wonderfully sweet voice in the gentle ensemble number “Before I Go.”
Jim Hogan is Kimberly’s father, Buddy. Beer-sodden, the misfunctioning alcoholic is never a reliable buddy, his one constant being to fall short on every promise. Hogan translates the character into borderline affability; in the gentle song “Hello Baby” he resignedly acknowledges his weaknesses.
An endearing quartet of high school show choir wannabes — Grace Capeless, Darron Hayes, Skye Alyssa Friedman and Pierce Wheeler — are equally adept at their harmonies and conveying their group’s innocent sexual confusions in an adolescent discovery phase.
These who-craves-whom befuddlements are reminiscent of the delusional lovers lost in the Shakespearean woods of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Debra is this play’s Oberon; she abruptly clarifies and squelches the quartet’s unrealized attractions in about two seconds flat).
“Kimberly Akimbo” is set in 1999 New Jersey, “before kids had cell phones,” the program reminds us. The production is small-scale and cheery enough with sets sliding on and off stage for the home, the school library and the Skater Planet rink (where, somehow, during the hopeful Act 1 finale “This Time,” there is a neat trick of swirling skaters gliding on the Segerstrom stage minus real ice!).
“Kimberly Akimbo” won the 2023 Tony for best musical, plus Tony awards for Lindsey-Abaire’s book and Tesori’s original songs.
(Extremely) good things, it turns out, can come in small packages. This unique, endearing show is one of them.
‘Kimberly Akimbo’
Rating: 4 stars (out of a possible four).
When: Through Feb. 2: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 2 and 7:30 p.m, Saturday, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday
Where: Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa
Tickets: $44.07-$157.07
Information: 949-556-2787; scfta.org
Leave a Reply