Girlhood

Kimberly Akimbo's Broadway growth spurt reveals even more of its magic.

- JACKSON MCHENRY

A PECULIAR PLEASURE in watching Kimberly Akimbo comes from thinking the musical could not possibly pull off what it is trying to accomplish and being proved wrong. Somewhere in the first act, you get nervous, perhaps just about the degree of difficulty. The premise is at once straightforward and surreal: A 16-year-old girl is in high school in 1990s New Jersey, living with a rare disease (similar to progeria, though unnamed) that makes her age at four to five times the normal rate. Upon that, there are layers of absurdity: her kookily self-involved parents, a Greek chorus of classmates in show choir, her deliriously criminal aunt. By the time the script has introduced a plot involving check fraud, it seems nearly unstable. But then it all syncs up, like a jumbled Rubik’s Cube solved with a few decisive turns, or—to invoke another device from the show—an anagram right at the moment when the rearranged letters fall into a new meaning, and Kimberly Akimbo reveals that it’s been dealing in simple, unbearable truths all along.