Life is short, so don’t delay your great adventures.
That’s the crystal-clear leitmotif of the deeply emotional, very funny, melodically beautiful “Kimberly Akimbo,” the 2023 best musical Tony Award winner making a welcome stop in Chicago about eight months into its national tour.
The title character, played here by three-time Tony Award nominee Carolee Carmello in a performance all the more moving for its understatedness, suffers from an ultra-rare disease that causes rapid aging, meaning that Kimberly looks 60-plus even though she’s only just turning 16 years old. Her entire life has been sped up physically but not emotionally. She has been through menopause but hasn’t yet had her first crush on a boy. Her mortality looms large, not just for her but for her unable-to-deal parents, for whom the description “dysfunctional” would be a generous compliment.
The show is set in suburban New Jersey, standing in as an emblem of drab nowheresville where teenagers populate the local ice-skating rink on Friday nights when they’re not invited to the cool kids’ parties. We first meet Kimberly’s father Buddy (Jim Hogan) when he shows up in the rink’s parking lot, awfully tipsy and two hours late to pick her up, which means she’s been waiting in the snowstorm for him. But when Buddy forgets Kimberly’s birthday, his wife Pattie purposely ignores it. She has taken to inventing her own health problems as a coping mechanism.
The story proper starts when Kimberly begins to bond with fellow teenager Seth (an outstanding Miguel Gil, who understudied the role on Broadway), a geeky puzzle lover who, having lost his mother, seems unintimidated by difficult conversations and is just as happy to make a friend, and unlikely romantic interest, as Kimberly is.
What book writer David Lindsay-Abaire (who also wrote the play from which this musical is adapted), composer Jeanine Tesori and director Jessica Stone get so right with this high-concept premise is the way they blend the extreme with the ordinary, the aching with the whimsical, the relatable with the ridiculous.
The parents here are actually comical in their parental incompetence, and yet also understandable characters, working-class folks now about to have a second kid who, even though it doesn’t need to be said out loud, say out loud how much they’re hoping the baby won’t be like Kimberly. They deepen as humans as the show goes along in what is very much a character-driven rather than plot-driven story.
To juice the skewed wackiness that’s a Lindsay-Abaire signature, we have Pattie’s sister Debra (Emily Koch), a petty criminal who loves Kimberly, although that doesn’t stop her from using her niece for her various schemes. An over-the-top character, Debra provides a slim little caper plot and Tesori numbers that deliver the uninhibited but still edgy humor necessary to balance the seriousness of the themes. Her caper also incorporates the ensemble chorus, a group of Kimberly’s classmates who embody adolescent awkwardness aplenty.
I wish I could say the comedy worked as well in this version as it did on Broadway, but the supporting performances seem to be experiencing a bit of road-tour burnout. These are talented performers — although I question whether Koch is cast correctly as a comic, mildly villainous ne’er-do-well. Many scenes among the family and the ensemble lack the sharp timing and carefully calibrated emotional arcs, made even more problematic by sound levels that are overly muffled. A bit less than halfway through its tour, it’s time for a rehearsal refresh.
Fortunately, that isn’t true at all of the leads in Carmello and Gil, who come off very much like completely complementary soulmates.
Carmello delivers an ever-so-slightly different take on the character than Victoria Clark did on Broadway, a part for which the latter deservedly won the Tony. Clark invested Kimberly with a naturally sunny disposition that has been gradually worn down by her circumstances. Carmello comes off a bit more somber at the start, someone for whom happiness wouldn’t necessarily be the default emotion. But this works really well opposite Gil — perhaps even a bit sunnier than the original Justin Cooley — and even helps the emotional payoff when Kimberly realizes she needs to take her happiness into her own hands.
When all the contradictory feels of joy and melancholy come together in harmonious union in the finale — called, so appropriately, “Great Adventure” — “Kimberly Akimbo” provides ones of those truly special moments in the theater. And fortunately, you can call that song up for months after and it can bring you right back into its meaningful uplift. This musical really is that good, and some limitations of the tour production can’t dampen the potency.