The Awkward Age

With its offbeat premise, stirring score, and superlative cast, Kimberly Akimbo is planting a flag for the wonderfully weird on Broadway.

- By Adam Green

If you were spitballing ideas for a show that would make you the toast of Broadway, the story of a fat, Black, queer musical theater writer struggling to write a musical about a fat, Black, queer musical theater writer struggling to, etc., might not be at the top of your list. But when Michael R. Jackson's dazzling A Strange Loop won best musical at the Tony Awards last June, it confirmed that there is a place-an appetite, even for offbeat, challenging work on Broadway. Now, in the footsteps of A Strange Loop and such other less-than-obvious Tony winners as Fun Home and The Band's Visit, comes a new contender, fresh from a soldout off-Broadway run at the Atlantic Theater: Kimberly Akimbo. David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori's gorgeous, tragicomic chamber musical stars Victoria Clark as a suburban teen with a medical condition similar to progeria that drastically accelerates her aging process and shortens her life. Clark classifies the show, which opened at the Booth Theatre on November 10, as "weird art." "It's not trying to be anything other than what it wants to be," she says. "That is exactly how Kimberly ends up living her life and it's kind of a lesson for all of us, to get to the core of who we are and display those colors proudly." As the idiosyncratic playwright of Fuddy Meers and the Pulitzer Prizewinning Rabbit Hole, Lindsay-Abaire has made a career exploring the intersection of laughter and heartbreak, anchoring surreal flights of fancy in emotional truth and a keen awareness of mortality. "Funny is a place to start, but it's got to be grounded in something or it's going to float away onstage," he tells me. "More often than not, what I ground it in is a place of pain, and I should probably talk to my therapist about that."