Review: Touching, quirky ‘Kimberly Akimbo,’ winner of 2023 Tony for best musical, steals hearts

The great Victoria Clark won a Tony Award for her performance in “Kimberly Akimbo,” and the question was always who could fill her shoes when David Lindsay Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s Tony-winning musical went on tour.

Well, we have an answer. Broadway veteran Carolee Carmello, a three-time Tony nominee, is heartbreakingly wonderful in the national tour production that has arrived at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre in quirkily adorable form.

Kimberly Levaco, the musical’s protagonist, is an ordinary teenager from New Jersey who has an extremely rare genetic disorder that rapidly accelerates the aging process. While her peers are still in the throes of puberty, she’s already gone through menopause. What should be the beginning of her life is in fact close to the end.

When Seth (a winning Miguel Gil) proposes that he and Kimberly team up on a class presentation on her condition, she informs him that the life expectancy for people like her is only about 16 years. Kimberly is about to celebrate her 16th birthday. This sounds incredibly sad, and it is, though not in the way you might think.

Carolee Carmello, left, Miguel Gil and Jim Hogan in the national tour of “Kimberly Akimbo.”

(Joan Marcus)

Based on the 2000 play by Lindsay-Abaire, “Kimberly Akimbo,” an exquisitely life-affirming show, proceeds with off-kilter comedy. Seth, who loves anagrams and puzzles of any kind, scrambles Kimberly Levaco’s name into Cleverly Akimbo. And “akimbo,” in the sense of something being askew or awry (as in a person’s hair after waking up), is a perfect description for this flamboyantly playful musical.

Lindsay-Abaire’s book and lyrics and Tesori’s peppy Broadway pop music have a madcap streak that resists ever being maudlin. But the production, directed by Jessica Stone, doesn’t shy away from the delicate melancholy of the story.

Kimberly comes to like the way her new friend Seth sees the world. As she sings in “Anagram,” “I like the way you understand. / I like the way you think. / A little weird / A little wise / A little outta sync.” The song evokes the same reassuring warmth generated by that indelible “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” ditty “It’s You I Like,” especially as reinterpreted by Sherie Rene Scott in her 2010 Broadway show “Everyday Rapture.”

Wise beyond their years, Kimberly and Seth have no choice but to grow up extremely quickly. Kimberly learns Seth suffered the loss of his mother when she asks about the ring he has hanging on a chain around his neck. Mortality isn’t an abstraction for either character. But an intimate knowledge of death isn’t all they have in common.

Carolee Carmello stars in the national tour of “Kimberly Akimbo.”

(Joan Marcus)

Both Kimberly and Seth are saddled with immature families. We don’t meet Seth’s father or brother, but we understand from the bits and pieces he shares with Kimberly why he feels as alone in the world as she does. Kimberly’s flagrantly dysfunctional parents are only too present in the show.

We first meet Buddy (Jim Hogan) when he arrives hours late to pick up his daughter at the skating rink. He’s been drinking, as usual, and counting on Kimberly to cover up his parental lapses. Pattie (Dana Steingold) is a bubbly narcissist, who is pregnant with a child she hopes will be normal and healthy, unlike her daughter. Kimberly feels her mother is already planning to replace her.

She’s not being over-sensitive: Pattie is a piece of work. Having just had double surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome, she has two casts on her arms, rendering her incapable of even feeding herself. Kimberly has no choice but to do for her mother what her mother has only inadequately done for her. (Steingold and Hogan play up the comedy without effacing their characters’ selfish cruelty.)

Yet Buddy and Pattie are adult role models when compared with Debra (Emily Koch), Kimberly’s aunt who’s still on parole for a shocking crime that only puts Kimberly’s parents in a more dastardly light. Debra hasn’t been rehabilitated. She cooks up a check fraud scheme and enlists Kimberly, Seth and their schoolmates (who serve as a dynamic backup chorus when required) to assist her and assume most of the risk.

This money-making caper dominates the second act of a show that is a bit overstretched. Koch, taking on the role that won Bonnie Mulligan a Tony, is a felonious hoot. And Delia (Grace Capeless), Martin (Darron Hayes), Teresa (Skye Alyssa Friedman) and Aaron (Pierce Wheeler), the amorously mismatched students who are desperate to raise funds for their show choir costumes, add to the eccentric merriment. But the musical’s heart belongs to Carmello’s Kimberly and Gil’s Seth, thanks to the tenderness that unexpectedly flowers between them.

In the early number “Make a Wish,” Kimberly composes her letter to the Make a Wish foundation. But it’s not a treehouse that she really wants. It’s to be seen as a person, with hopes and desires, and not as an imminent tragedy. This is what Seth magically offers her. He doesn’t mind that she has begun to resemble a grandmother. He sees beyond her wizening appearance to the youthful essence within.

Gil conveys the kind of adolescent sensitivity that’s born out of hardship and loss. He makes Seth’s geeky kindness seem like one of the true earthly wonders. As Kimberly, Carmello is both old before her time and eternally innocent, a newly bloomed rose already losing her petals.

This double reality is communicated not just in her acting but in her singing. Carmello, who received one of her Tony nominations for her performance in the Broadway premiere of “Parade,” finds a youthful voice for Kimberly but imbues it with hints of the powerful maturity in her final numbers that brings home the poignant poetry of this fable of a show.

The lesson of ‘Kimberly Akimbo,” as expressed in the final number “Great Adventure,” is that we’re all “sailing to a distant shore,” so “just enjoy the view, because no one gets a second time around.” Sometimes, however, second chances do come about. Although I admired the heralded Broadway production, I found myself more open to the quirky charms of “Kimberly Akimbo” at the Hollywood Pantages.

There’s no accounting for when a show will speak to you, but this fleetly staged, sensationally acted touring production is first-rate all around. And Carmello miraculously makes Kimberly her own by inhabiting this teenage senior from the inside out.