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The title character of Kimberly Akimbo is a teenager aging prematurely due to an unnamed, progeria-like condition. She faces the challenges common to young adults—family dysfunction, self-determination, first love—while confronting her own mortality; she’s 16 years old going on 65. Yet for all this heavy baggage, Kimberly is upbeat and hopeful, as is the five-time Tony Award-winning musical that surrounds her. The author of Kimberly Akimbo’s book and lyrics, David Lindsay-Abaire, took a moment to talk about the musical’s influence and themes on the eve of its seven-show run at the Smith Center.
This is Kimberly Akimbo’s first national tour. How’s the road trip going so far?
It’s been amazing. The response has been terrific, and it’s a really great production. You know, when you leave Broadway, you think, are we going to lose that spark? Is it going to be as good as it was on Broadway? And it has been that, and then some.
Has taking the show beyond Broadway changed your perception of it?
It’s been incredibly gratifying to see it play the same as it has in New York. … You don’t know how other people are going to respond to the strange tone of the play. It’s not a straightforward comedy and it’s not a straightforward drama; it really lives between those two places. It can be tricky for an audience to sort out exactly what the show is sometimes. … You can go see it on Wednesday and feel the audience not knowing what it is and then figuring it out by the third scene, and then see it on the next day, and [that audience] knows from the very beginning that it’s okay to laugh and that it’s equally sad at the same time.
Kimberly Akimbo was originally a play; your collaborator Jeanine Tesori suggested it could be put to music. Was that a difficult thing to do?
It was an amazing thing to do, because it was a play that I had enough space and time away from that I could reinvestigate it. We worked hard to not lose the things that Jeanine and I both liked about the play, while totally reinventing it by adding these songs and expanding the cast, and it’s just a completely different animal now, but the seed of it is still there ... It’s an exciting thing to take something that I thought I knew, inside and out, and completely transform into something new.
Kimberly, the character, stays positive in bad circumstances. Can we follow her lead? Is storytelling enough to lift us up in hard times?
Oh, gosh, I had an answer, but you used the word enough. Is it enough? God, I hope it helps. I know that when I see a show, just for those two-and-a-half hours, I leave the world and I go to a different place. Sometimes it’s a place that’s similar to this world and sometimes it’s different, but I always feel a connection between myself and what’s happening on stage, and it gives me hope; I feel healed by it. And I walk out of the theater feeling like, I don’t know, maybe things aren’t so bad after all. It certainly helps to soothe a little bit.
KIMBERLY AKIMBO February 4-9, times vary, $35-$173. Reynolds Hall, thesmithcenter.com.
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English (US) ·