In ‘Kimberly Akimbo,' a teen with some unusual angst

Boston Globe

02-05-2025

After an extended run on Broadway, where it won five Tony Awards including best musical, 'Kimberly Akimbo' skates into Boston at the Emerson Colonial Theatre, presented by Broadway in Boston, May 6-18, on its national tour.
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
Inspired by Lindsay-Abaire's own absurdist play from 2001, the mordant musical-comedy follows the story of a sensitive and upbeat yet beleaguered teenager, Kimberly Levaco, who's growing up in suburban New Jersey. Kimberly is not your average 16-year-old misfit who feels like she doesn't belong. Her predicament is unusual. Because of her rapid-aging condition, similar to
Advertisement
'She's dealing with her mortality, and I certainly can relate to that part of her experience,' Carmello says, a three-time Tony nominee. 'If I'm lucky enough to have a couple more decades, what do I want to do with whatever time is left? And that's exactly the question she's facing. Twenty days or 20 years, it's a finite amount.'
Exacerbating Kimberly's situation are her parents Buddy (Jim Hogan) and Pattie (Laura Woyasz), a pair of dysfunctional and self-absorbed hot messes suffering from a collective case of arrested development. Buddy drinks too much, and Pattie is a hypochondriac. They love Kim deeply, but they struggle to do right by her. Then there's the hilarious hurricane of chaos, Aunt Debra (Emily Koch), a snarky bull in a china shop who blasts back into the family's lives on the run from the law.
(L to R) Laura Woyasz, Emily Koch, Carolee Carmello and Jim Hogan.
Patrick Gray, KabikPhotoGroup.com
At school, Kimberly befriends a kind-hearted, nerdy new kid named Seth Weedus (Miguel Gil), who's obsessed with anagrams and speaks in Elvish. They make an instant connection. Then there's a quartet of classmates, who are show choir-obsessed, sexually confused outcasts with cross-wire crushes on each other. 'She's exactly like them and also they're who she will never actually be,' Lindsay-Abaire says in a Zoom interview from his home in Brooklyn, 'because they have their bright shiny futures ahead, and she has a very limited amount of time.'
Advertisement
To channel those formative years, Carmello observed and studied the body language of teenagers in real life. 'How do they hold their shoulders? How much eye contact do they give? There's a self-consciousness because you don't feel comfortable in your own skin yet — 'I'm not really sure if I want to look at you because I don't know what you're thinking about me.''
She vividly recalls being 14 or 15 years old and walking down the street in her hometown of Albany, N.Y., and feeling overwhelmed by anxieties over 'grades, feeling like I didn't fit in socially with whatever group I was aspiring to, probably having a crush on somebody who didn't notice me, and dealing with my parents, who didn't understand anything that I was doing.
'I remember that feeling and saying to myself, 'I'm never going to forget how hard this is and how nobody understands. I want to be an adult who remembers how hard this is,' because adults are dismissive of kids that age. So I'm tapping into that.'
For the show's creators, the choice to adapt 'Kimberly Akimbo' into a musical had a few advantages. Since it was Lindsay-Abaire's play, he held the rights. Plus, the 'scaffolding' of the story was already in place and it didn't have an overabundance of plot. 'There was elbow room in there to get under the hood and actually expand on what was in the play and dig in a little bit deeper,' he says.
''Kimberly' had very complicated characters with rich inner lives, deep emotional needs, desires, urges, and longings, and that's what you want in a musical. So you can stop a scene and tell the audience what they're feeling or what they hope to achieve or make a realization in the midst of the song.'
Advertisement
Lindsay-Abaire's plays have always walked a delicate tonal tightrope of acerbic, absurdist, and laugh-out-loud comedy with fathoms-deep explorations of pain, heartache, and regret. He can trace his sweet-and-sour style to the sardonic commentary that spilled forth from the family and friends he grew up with in South Boston. 'The comedy comes out of these painful places, and the pain comes out of the funny places sometimes, and that's how it always was in my family,' he says. 'If somebody made a comment that cut so deep or something was so painful, the only way to have relief from it was to make a joke out of it.'
'Horrible things would happen, and we would laugh ourselves sick at them. But that's just how we would cope with hard times,' he says. 'It was the armor that [my family] wore to protect themselves from the pain that was at their centers.'
In writing the show, he and Tesori struck that careful balance. 'If anything ever became too earnest, Jeanine would say, 'Oh yes, but we need to squeeze some lemon juice on it now,'' he says. 'Or if something was feeling too funny, 'let's have a penny drop moment where we make the audience gasp a little bit.''
In revisiting the characters more than two decades after he wrote the original play, Lindsay-Abaire learned more about them and found his perspective shifting. 'When I first wrote it, I was mostly identifying with the younger characters and really channeling some baggage I had in my relationship with my parents,' he says.
Advertisement
But now that he's a dad with two sons of his own, 'I hope [the parents] have a little more humanity, that we see how Buddy's drinking and Patty's narcissism is a direct result of their terror of losing their child. This is what they are doing to themselves in order to not feel this horrible pain. It was something I had a lot more access to in writing the musical.'
Ultimately, Carmello hopes audiences walk away with a reminder to cherish our time on earth. Echoing the lyrics of the final song 'Great Adventure,' she says, 'Look around at the things and the people that are important to you and just appreciate them, because you never know when it's going to be over. We only get one chance to do this, so try to live the life that you want to live.'
KIMBERLY AKIMBO
Book and lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire, music by Jeanine Tesori, presented by Broadway in Boston. At The Emerson Colonial Theatre, May 6-18. Tickets from $45; 888-616-0272;
Christopher Wallenberg can be reached at