It’s a tricky elevator pitch for a night out. On the one hand, Kimberly Levaco, the protagonist, is aging in dog years and has just hit a not so sweet 16, her condition’s median life expectancy. On the other, Kimberly Akimbo, the show, bagged five Tonys in 2023 including Best Musical.
Short response – see it!
We open in a very American, very working class, very left-behind town in Noo Joisey. I could almost hear Bruce Springsteen’s "The River" playing in my head long before the actual show's songs took its place, New Jersey’s most famous resident casting a long shadow.
Maybe the continual drip of Trumpian dysfunctionality that seems impossible to keep out of one’s life these days has hardened my heart to anything too obviously rooted in contemporary (well, contemporaryish, it's 1999) USA. That said, I’ve always had a bit of a downer on All-American High Schoolers with their competitive glee clubs and their bonding on the bleachers watching the football team and cheerleaders. Blame an early exposure to Grease, whose teens also seemed to be aging rather quickly.
So the show had a bit of work to do for me after the opening ten minutes or so but, boy, does it do that, and more!
Six friends, who all would like to be more than that, but not necessarily with the "right one", are preparing a biology class presentation on a disease of their own choosing. When we see them in Act Two, the jolt of witnessing a fully working overhead projector would have startled M. Proust, one of many details that are just so.
They’re at an awkward age but you feel they’re always going to be awkward no matter how old they are. Seth, all goofy charm and oversharing his enthusiasms, blurts out that he and Kimberly could do her condition, turning the exercise into an excruciating show-and-tell. You wonder how she, this quiet, insecure outsider even amongst the outsiders, this granny-faced teen, could ever have agreed to it, but she’s keen on Seth and she’s tired of hiding. My inner voice shouted – in an American accent, natch – “You go girl!”
Meanwhile, Kimberly’s mother is very pregnant, her father is still swilling beers and her crazy aunt, from whom they are running away, has turned up with a hare-brained plan to steal cheques, wash them and then cash them to fund costumes for the singing competition and a road trip for Kimberly. Home is not short of love, but the bickering swamps the one resident who has every right to be act entitled, who is, inevitably, the one resident who doesn’t.
What a spectacularly effective set Soutra Gilmour has provided for director Michael Longhurst! On a revolve and three levels high, it converts so quickly from school to home to car to library, with its pièce de résistance two gigantic butterfly wings that open to show videos Kimberly’s mother, Pattie, makes for her unborn child. A couple of years ago, I’d rather have sat through another performance of Trainspotting than see any more handheld cameras on stage, but it works, like so much else, wonderfully well.
Performances are strong throughout the cast (pictured above), turning what could be a set of stock characters in a potboiler of a plot into living, rounded individuals for whom we care deeply. A key to effecting that alchemy is the marshalling of musical theatre’s unique resources. David Lindsay-Abaire (book and lyrics and also the writer of the play on which the show is based) and Jeanine Tesori (music) use the score to reveal inner lives and lay bare insecurities. The songs articulate not just desires – the show is not short of ‘I Want’ numbers – but also lend considerable weight to matters as apparently mundane as a kid wishing for a treehouse.
Buddy, hitherto an unreliable and slobbish husband to Pattie and father to Kimberly, is transformed by Peter Hannah’s delivery of “Hello Baby”, secretly sung down the camera to the child still in the womb. We see the man he could be and we understand emotionally both why he is not that man and why he is so keen that the next generation do not repeat his mistakes. Not that he knows what to do in order to achieve that.
We already know everything that Gilli Jones tells us about Seth, the kid for Kimberly, in “Good Boy” but the writing is so intelligent and the delivery so heartfelt that his character moves from your head to your heart. That’s a journey musicals do in three minutes and plays in thirty.
It’s not all tangled webs of self-discovery. Alice Fearn is a riot as Debra, the jailbird fraudster who is much brighter than she lets on in a low-cunning way. Blunt and ruthless, but not quite an evil stepmother, she has a lot of fun and you do gain the impression that, if the kids can stay out of juvenile hall, they’ll learn more from her than from all their teachers combined.
Anchoring it all, Maria Friedman’s Kimberly is a bundle of fear and joy, of anticipation and hesitancy, of resilience and damage. She’s not perfect, not some doomed, Victorian paragon of virtue, but a girl with the same dreams as any other – just inside a body that is fading like a flower in a stop-motion film. That truth hits you like a hammer when she dons her disguise for the heist, a gasp-inducing scene. Never for a moment do we think that this is a late-middle aged actress getting down with the kids, because Friedman plays exactly as written, becoming a prematurely aged teen. No spoilers, but there are two or three lines that land in the base of your stomach like few do in any play, musical or opera, one a reflection on her very different adolescence that made me miss the next couple of minutes as I recovered.
With Seth and Kimberly’s escape - kinda escape - a wonderful moral emerges explicitly, one I cannot endorse more strongly, one that captures pretty much everything that came before it. Turns out jazz hands can also point in the right direction.
Walking the few steps back to the Tube station, buoyed as only an unexpectedly perfect musical can buoy me, I wondered why anyone would spend an evening doomscrolling on their phone alone and scared, when they could spend that time in the company of Kimberly and her goofy friends and dodgy family. After all, it’s later than you think.
