Theatre review: Kimberly Akimbo
A new Australian production of the hit Broadway musical see Marina Prior play a rapidly ageing teenage girl, in a joyous celebration of life at its most imperfect moments.
Kimberly Levaco’s first two wishes to the Make a Wish Foundation — a charity organisation for critically ill children — are to be a model for a day and to have a party on a yacht. Her third wish is trickier to pin down. There are so many things still to do in her life: travel, bungy jump, sit down to a normal dinner with a normal family. Instead she writes ‘treehouse’, the dream of anything ‘normal’ tucked away into her opening song.
Kimberly lives with an incredibly rare genetic condition, her body ageing four times faster than the average person. (Though it’s not named in the musical, it’s similar to Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome progeria.) She tells her new friend Seth (Darcy Wain)that most people with the disease only live to sixteen. Taking place over the days leading up to and following her sixteenth birthday, Kimberly Akimbo heeds the great Muddy Waters’ motto of singing sad songs happy and happy songs sad, and this sad song is exuberant.
Played by famed soprano Marina Prior, who in her early sixties is closely aligned to Kimberly’s sixteen-going-on-sixty-four, Kimberly is a practical yet dreamy girl whose frustration with her drunken however well-meaning father (Nathan O’Keefe) and self-absorbed mother (Christie Whelan Browne) runs equal to her love for them. Through the alignment of this doom-bringing birthday, meeting Seth and discovering that her fluttering heart is not a symptom of her disease but one of first love, and the sudden return of her con-artist Aunt Debra (Casey Donovan), a very niche stage is set. And what a bright stage it is, with all the various purples, pinks, oranges and yellows — an inspired reflection of the show’s joie de vivre and camped-up teen familiarity.
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Pulitzer Prize winner David Lindsay-Abaire’s script and lyrics, together with Jeanine Tesori’s music, unleash a surprising and remarkable simplicity one would never expect paired with the complexity of a young person facing death. Humour is a sturdy and glowing thread throughout — I mean, this musical is fun! — while lyrics like, ‘We live in a house that’s haunted / There’s always you / There’s always me / There’s always the girl I’ll never be’, are instinctively timed to create an undertone of gravity. Steering away from a sober rumination on dying, this State Theatre Company South Australia and Melbourne Theatre Company co-production is a joyous celebration of life at its most imperfect moment.
Prior embodies Kimberly with easy conviction, though her very technical, mature vibrato sometimes jars. Until, that is, you remember Kimberly’s maturity is not only due to the fact she underwent menopause at the age of twelve, but that her life experience would gift her an insight beyond her young years. Recent Elder Conservatorium graduate Wain is inherently delightful as the impossible-not-to-adore, quirky and layered sixteen-year-old Seth, who reframes the difficulties of life through anagram games — hence the title of the show.
Both O’Keefe and Whelan Browne, as Kimberly’s parents, own their unashamedly flawed characters, while the ensemble of teenage friends caught up in their cartoon-swooning love quadrangles are played by a flashy and frolicsome chorus lead by the talents of Marty Alix, Allycia Angeles, Alana Iannace and Jacob Rozario. But when Donovan (actress and youngest winner of Australian Idol) takes the stage as if it’s her very own catwalk, it’s game on. Like the lovechild of Patti LaBelle and Cruella de Vil, there’s nothing figurative about saying she bursts into song, and she’s reason enough to run — don’t walk — to Her Majesty’s Theatre. Four-time Helpmann awarded and former State Theatre artistic director Mitchell Butel directs this outstanding cast in this feel-great musical with what comes across as great fervour and ardour.
It’s vivacious and deep-reaching musicals like this that can act as temporary antidote to our days, where time’s position in a world that won’t wait is ever-precarious.
Kimberly Akimbo continues at Her Majesty’s Theatre until July 19, then Arts Centre Melbourne from July 26 – August 30