It’s New Jersey at the turn of the century and Kimberly Levaco is approaching her 16th birthday, trying to make her way in a new school in a new town. She navigates the outcast show choir kids (will they be her friends?), the cute boy who loves anagrams (will he become something more?) and her parents, who had her when they were in high school themselves, and still haven’t got it together.
Kimberly is trying to figure herself out. Who she is, what she wants from her life – and how to handle the fact that she has a genetic condition which causes her to age four times faster than her peers.
Kimberly Akimbo, from Jeanine Tesori (music) and David Lindsay-Abaire (book), is a gem of a show about youth and ageing. How do you face being a teenager when you’re in the body of a woman in her 60s? How do you hold out hope that things will be better when you leave high school, if that day may never come for you?
Kimberly Akimbo is both introspective and an absurdist comedy, built on a loving mosaic of musical influences. It is dark and sad in places – Kimberly (Marina Prior) is let down by every adult in her life, who are unthinking and damaged people. She is let down by her body as she comes up against her life expectancy. But it is also a funny musical filled with joy and heart, silly capers and unrequited love. If occasionally the balance between pathos and vaudeville doesn’t quite hold – a complicated cheque washing scheme feels, at times, like it’s from another story altogether – there is enough brain at play that you’re willing to go along for the ride.
Mitchell Butel’s new Australian production takes the contrasting ideas the writers are playing with and runs with them, joyfully clashing together disparate ideas and elements. Jonathon Oxlade’s set is all dreamy pastels, lit up by Matt Scott’s neon lighting design. Their abstract design elements play up against Ailsa Paterson’s realistic costuming – which, being the 90s, is itself full of mismatched colours and discording patterns.
Butel gives his cast space to really breathe into and sit within the realism of his characters – but then, of course, it is a musical, and the heightened world of song is lifted to be only more absurd by Amy Campbell’s intelligent choreography, especially that of the show’s geek chorus (the choir).
This is Kimberly’s show. It is a beautiful part for an actor – the gawkiness, earnestness and first loves of teenagehood, dressed up in a role for an actor in her 60s. Prior slouches around Kimberly’s house, melts into the beanbags at the school library and absentmindedly chews on a candy necklace. Her voice is rich and pure and sure, her characterisation intelligent. Prior’s performance is never condescending or cynical about teenagers; it is all heart, and she folds neatly into the bright young ensemble. Kimberly is upbeat and strong-willed; and someone who is hurting, beneath it all.
Perhaps the trickiest line the show walks is how much Kimberly is let down by the adults in her life. Pattie (Christie Whelan Browne) and Buddy (Nathan O’Keefe) are not good parents to Kimberly; her aunt Debra (Casey Donovan), who implicates Kimberly and her friends in a hare-brained scheme, is not a good aunt.
It would be easy for these characters to be built as either completely irredeemable, or else brush over their flaws as mere foibles. But Butel and his cast finds the loving, human balance – letting the actors each have their star turn (especially Whelan Browne, who gives a bewitching and heightened performance that just skirts the line of farce), but never losing sight of their treatment of Kimberly and how, in every way, she deserves better – and is prepared to go out and get it.
How do you live when you know it is going to end? This is a question that will come for us all. For her part, Kimberly decides she is going to live life as a great adventure. For the rest of us, this treasure of a musical can be part of our own.
