‘Kimberly Akimbo’ Isn’t About Making Wishes

In Kimberly Akimbo, David Lindsay-Abaire’s upsized and upgraded musical version of his 2001 comedy, the perfection begins before the lights go down. 

We enter Knight Theater, where the Blumenthal production runs through April 27, and see a stage-filling projection of blue sky with white clouds punctuated by a telephone pole. A play prompt and the customary triangle icon recognizable to all generations from VCR and Walkman to iPod and Netflix users is superimposed over the scene. 

Aside from an occasional group of birds traversing the sky, there’s nothing to contradict the assumption that the picture is frozen. Strangely innocuous for this acclaimed Broadway musical that won five Tony Awards in 2023, including Best Musical.

Yet we find out that this spacious emptiness, promising to pan or dissolve into something interesting once the play button is pressed, will be one of the strands in Lindsay-Abaire’s musical book that will demonstrate Akimbo’s exquisite circularity and interconnectedness as Kim’s brief and inspirational story unfolds. 

We learn quickly that Kim’s story must be short because she suffers from an incurable genetic disease that causes her to age at four to five times the usual pace. About to turn 16 at a birthday party staged at a skating rink, she is reaching her median life expectancy. Not so sweet.

Nor is Kim’s disease silent or invisible. She looks four times her age, so at high school, she doesn’t exactly fit in with her classmates — except for her fellow misfits.

Quintupling the crew she had in the 2001 stage comedy, Kim teams up with five of them. 

The holdover, Seth, is the good kid who rents out the skates at the rink. But the new kids, headed by Grace Capeless as ambitious Delia, help to expand Lindsay-Abaire’s scenario in key ways, adding to Kimberly’s motives to latch on to serious cash and opening up numerous locales to Broadway musical-sized inventions.

They help populate the skating rink, where choreographer Danny Mefford can have the student chums dancing on ice skates. Lindsay-Abaire and ace composer Jeanine Tesori can think about adding scenes in a high school hallway to conceive their money-making caper and in a classroom, where three couples team up to present competing term projects on diseases.

No other students appear to haze or mock the misfits, but that seems to be OK.

Our attention remains riveted on the budding May-December romance between Miguel Gil as Seth and Carolee Carmello as the titular Kim. To arrive at a title as kookie as Akimbo, Lindsay-Abaire needed someone like Seth, an anagram fanatic, to make it happen — and make him interested enough in Kim to give her full name, Kimberly Levaco, a few spins. 

He doesn’t instantly ask her out. Rather, he sees her as an ideal partner for their class project, using her disease as their subject. The anagram, “cleverly akimbo,” becomes a stepping stone toward deeper intimacy.

Charmingly, the thrills are as surprising and awkward to them as they are to us, chastely delayed. For a 16-year-old outsider like Seth, going out for the first time ever — with someone whose biological clock has nearly run down — compounds his natural adolescent cluelessness. 

Kim and her parents, meanwhile, seem to have crossed courtship off their lists of future expectations for her, especially since they’re all newcomers in town just hoping to fit in. In fact, horizons seem limited for everyone. Over and over, they remind us: It’s New Jersey, “somewhere in Bergen County.”

It all makes for one of the most hilarious and surreal protective dad scenes in theatre history. Jim Hogan as the wayward beer-guzzling Buddy gets to go ballistic at the prospect of a good boy half his age putting even a tentative move on a daughter who looks like she’s twice her outraged father’s age. Not the usual target for a hormone-driven sex maniac.

After all of Hogan’s absurd and titanic fulminations, Carmello draws the killer comeback. “But Dad, I went through menopause four years ago!”

Laughter and wisdom come from unexpected places all evening long. Carmello, now in her early 60s, can regress adorably for a whole song to be devoted to Kim’s three-wish application to the Make-a-Wish Foundation. But it’s Emily Koch as Debra, the family’s black-sheep parolee, who prods Kimberly into risk-taking and adventure.

On the subtlety spectrum, Debra lands somewhere between Rosie O’Donnell and Dick Butkus (with a scene-stealing dash of Danny DeVito). Launching her sly sure-shot moneymaking caper, Debra breaks into Kim’s home and drags a US Postal Service mailbox across her niece’s living room, then deposits it across the stage where a staircase can be imagined leading to the cellar below.

That doesn’t exhaust Lindsay-Abaire’s keen capacity for sight gags or Debra’s brashness. She has depth, too! 

Confronting Delia’s quartet of sidekick misfits, who aspire to win the state championship as a vocal quartet once they can afford flashy costumes with their share of the heist, Debra does more than merely recruit them. Down in the cellar, she molds them, as well as Kim and Seth, into a money laundering assembly line in the climactic “How to Wash a Check.”

Almost casually, she majestically dispels all of the quartet’s individual teen anxieties and hesitations with four words: “Straight, straight, gay, gay.”

All of this comical eye candy diverts us from the quieter, unspoken undercurrents of Lindsay-Abaire’s story. For a long time, we don’t find out exactly how Deb screwed up back in Lodi (a borough elsewhere in Bergen County) or why her misdeeds forced the whole family to flee town, though we get hints. 

While that info remains on layaway, we see that Kim has inherited more than a lethal cocktail of genes from her parents, Buddy and Pattie. Unlike Aunt Debra, all the Levacos suffer from a wistful despair. Both Pattie and Buddy have a feeling they have thrown away their lives on their youthful impulsiveness, forced to lay low, settle down and take care of their special-needs child, whom they don’t see as special. 

Pattie is the more upbeat and assertive of the two, very pregnant with a second child who will make up for — and soon replace — the couple’s heartbreak over Kimberly.

Lots of wishful thinking among the Levacos; odds are one-in-five that the newborn will have the same disease as Kim. But Laura Woyasz as Pattie isn’t simply a waddling bimbo. She may seem that way at times, but although she has pretty much struck out as a mother for Kimberly, Pattie is making a conscientious effort to be better in her chance at a do-over. Genetically, she has contrived to improve her odds of avoiding a Kimberly replay.

Circa 1999, when this action takes place — “Before kids had cell phones,” Lindsay-Abaire insists — Pattie records her wishes and advice for her unborn child on a minicam. In his fits of regret and stabs at sobriety, Hogan also gets to show a more genial and upbeat side as Buddy. 

When Pattie isn’t looking, Buddy swipes her minicam and records the lessons he hopes the newborn will learn from his mistakes.

Ironically, the paths that Mom and Dad envision for the soon-to-be-born Levaco are contrary to those they have chosen for Kimberly, who has nearly wasted her entire life wishing rather than daring … playing it safe rather than risking … dreaming rather than living. There’s something to be said for Debra’s reckless just-do-it approach.

Kimberly will need to yank herself out of her own deathbed to see the light. Returning home, she comes face-to-face with the worst sight gag of her life. Adding one final crime to her rap sheet, she can now be free.

As for Tesori’s score, the hits keep coming in the wake of Theatre Charlotte’s revival of her Violet. This time the accompanying book reaches the same high level. Definitely press play on this Broadway winner.