The plight of someone with a rare medical condition that makes her look like she’s in her 60s, when she’s actually a teenager. Is that a great idea for a comedic play?
How about a Broadway musical with the same premise?
The answers: Yes. And yes.
The play Kimberly Akimbo, written by David Lindsay-Abaire, was a touching and at times very humorous meditation on mortality, adolescence, and family – in a culture obsessed with trying to stay (and look) young as we age. It was presented successfully at numerous regional theaters in cities including Portland after its 2001 premiere at South Coast Repertory, in southern California.
But it took two decades for the script to be transformed into a Tony Award-winning, Broadway musical with book and lyrics by Lindsay-Abaire, and music by Jeanine Tesori. And after it arrived on the Great White Way in 2022, the show actually won a bundle of Tonys — for best musical, book, score, leading actress, and supporting actress.
Kimberly Akimbo is now on national tour, and playing Tuesday through Sunday, Jan. 14-19, at Portland’s Keller Auditorium.
In this musical (as well as in the play), Kimberly was born with an actual, very rare genetic disorder called progeria (also known as Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome) which causes her to age several times faster than her peers. On the eve of her 16th birthday, she has to navigate the social minefield of entering a new school and in a new town. And she must confront the prospect of her preoccupied parents having another child whom they hope will be “normal” – a sibling she may not survive long enough to “grow up” with.
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Keenly aware of her medical condition and her parents’ various foibles, Kimberly is nevertheless an upbeat person who makes friends with a cluster of schoolmates who also feel like misfits. And she manages to navigate plenty of family dysfunction.
All this makes portraying her in the musical a plum and somewhat daunting assignment for a singer-actress who nabs the title role. The national tour coming to Portland (after a short run at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre) has cast someone who is very likely up to the job: the vivacious, vocally equipped Carolee Carmello, a versatile Broadway veteran and three-time Tony Award nominee. (Victoria Clark originated the role, and played it on Broadway.)
Asked about what has helped her with the assignment, Carmello cheerfully reports, “Well, the mature body came [easy] despite my best efforts … nothing I could do about that! The teenager part was trickier. I tried to watch how people in their teens move and talk and see the world. I tried to remember myself at that age… and remember what my own kids were like as teens.”
Another plus is being in an ensemble featuring younger performers, who join with Carmello in the show’s charming getting-to-know-you and hanging-out teen numbers. “It helps so much to be surrounded by talented actors who are much closer in age to [my character], and still have that energy!”
Ultimately, Carmello wants to help audiences empathize with Kimberly by making her as relatable as possible, despite her unusual predicament.
“I think she has all the same emotions we all have, just heightened by her situation,” she states. “Kimberly gets nervous, embarrassed, excited … and she is really hopeful despite all of her challenges. I think that’s why the audience roots for her.”
Kimberly’s world – at school, at home, and even at a community ice-skating rink – is colorfully evoked onstage by David Zinn, a Pacific Northwest native who is one of the most in-demand scenic designers working on Broadway. A 10-time Tony nominee (and three-time winner), the Bainbridge Island, Wash. native worked early in his career at theaters in Seattle, and in Portland (back in the 1990s, at Portland Center Stage). He also designed earlier musicals composed by Tesori (including the popular Fun Home), and was happy to continue that relationship in Kimberly.
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Explains Zinn, “I feel like my major focus in this show is not so much underscoring a particular character’s journey but rather making the ‘air’ around the circumstances of that journey feel right for the piece, so that [the design] feels like poetry and not a bunch of technical decisions and materials.”
“That said,” he adds, “the work on Kimberly has been a pretty satisfying volley between big design decisions and gestures, and then a ton of little detail work that hopefully plays in harmony. Dressing the inside of the kids’ school lockers was one of my favorite jobs of this process!”
If you want to catch more of Zinn’s scenic wizardry on Broadway soon, you are in luck. He earned a Tony last year for his set of a recording studio in the smash hit play Stereophonic. And coming up are his work on the long-delayed Broadway debut of the two-hander Jason Robert Brown musical The Last Five Years (it has been produced more than once in Portland, and a Seattle version opens Feb. 13 at ACT Theatre), and on the late Stephen Sondheim’s final show, Here We Are.
Kimberly Akimbo
- Broadway in Portland, national tour
- Where: Keller Auditorium, 222 S.W. Clay St., Portland
- When: Eight performances, Tuesday-Sunday, Jan. 14-19
- Ticket & Schedule information: Here
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