The brisk, bouncing lyrics of "Anagram," one of the showpiece songs in "Kimberly Akimbo," aptly sum up the insight and appeal of the 2023 Tony award-winning Best Musical by Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire, now playing at the Curran Theatre on its first national tour.
"I like the way you see the world, I like your point of view. A little sly, a little strange, a little bit askew."
While altogether delightful, little about this show is quite what you might expect. It's a contemporary dysfunctional family story, but unlike other recent musicals of that genre — "Next to Normal," "Dear Evan Hansen," "Jagged Little Pill," and Tesori's own "Fun Home"— it spurns sturm und drang, instead spinning whimsy around its gravitas.
It's a hit Broadway musical with virtually no dancing, scant plot closure, and no lyrics with repurposable universality. (Even the broad sentiment of "Anagram" is punctuated with so much context-driven specificity — "Icky eyeball, icky earlobe" — that it's hard to imagine the song reframed in some future cabaret act).
Off-kilter and often unfiltered, this is a show in which parents and children momentarily, with raw honesty, wish each other dead. "Kimberly Akimbo" is refreshingly original and confidently self-possessed. Like another one-time iconoclast now considered a 'classic,' it's a singular sensation.
Illness as metaphor
The plot of "Kimberly Akimbo" is typically nut-shelled as the story of a teenage girl with a rare genetic condition that causes accelerated physical aging. But that unlikely throughline is de-centered and set even further set askew, making the show all the richer.
At 16, Kimberly Lovato (62-year-old Carolee Carmello in a delicately calibrated, generously spotlight-sharing performance) is indeed grappling with a disease that effectively forces her to experience the soul-bearing indignities of adolescence and old age simultaneously.
Book writer and lyricist Lindsay-Abaire (who wrote the original play on which the musical is based) sums up this duality with a brilliant aperçu in the song "My Disease": "Getting older is my affliction," sings Kimberly to her sometimes-petty high school friends, "Getting older is your cure."
But Kimberly's is not the only unusual point-of-view audiences are privy to in this easygoing but deceptively straightforward show. The most prominent lens through which we see the story belongs Kim's fellow school outcast, Seth Weetis, the puzzle-loving inspiration for "Anagrams."
As played by Miguel Gil, with subtly flattened vocal affect and awkward physicality, this production's Seth — unlike the more aggressively endearing Broadway version, played by Justin Cooley — cannot simply be taken as a gawky, geeky teen. Gil's Seth is clearly on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum.
Autism or Asperger's syndrome is not identified by the script, but neither is progeria, Kim's disease. Lindsay-Abaire suggests that when pathologizing labels and their related presumptions are set aside, each of us has a unique, respect-worthy perspective within an overarching human condition.
The immediacy of Seth's perception allows him to feel unalloyed affection for Kimberly on an earnest, moment-to-moment basis. Kim, in the wisdom of her young old age, recognizes the value of this approach and strives to similarly savor the now.
A class act
Meanwhile Kim's family-like most of us-live in the dual grip of hindsight and anticipation. Degrees of grief, regret and recrimination relentlessly inch into our worldview, a condition poignantly described in "The Inevitable Turn," one of several songs in which the structure of Tesori's compositions brilliantly echo the characters' state of mind.
Kim's bumbling parents and Aunt Debra are played by Jim Hogan, Dana Steingold, and Emily Koch with just the right comic spark and subtextual tenderness to keep them appropriately situated between cartoon and "Roseanne."
A comic subplot about boisterous Debra masterminding a check-forging scheme executed by Kimberly, Seth and their four schoolmates, who are cleverly deployed as a chorus throughout the show, verges on frivolity. But while it first feels shoehorned into the storyline purely for comic relief, it's redeemed by a flurry of character-deepening surprises late in the second act.
I recommend "Kimberly Akimbo" wholeheartedly, but in the wake of the recent election, I recognized something I'd previously overlooked that's well worth mulling over if you're fortunate enough to see the show.
The teenage characters are given inner wisdom that transcends their age but also, by implication, their class. There's a buffoonery baked into the blue-collar adult characters that emits a whiff of condescension. It's not a kill defect. But it's there.
'Kimberly Akimbo,' through Dec. 1. $60-$165. Curran Theatre, 445 Geary St. www.broadwaysf.com
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