Kimberly Akimbo
Opening Night: November 10, 2022
Theater: Booth Theatre
Website: kimberlyakimbothemusical.com
Kim is a bright and funny Jersey teen, who happens to look like a 72-year-old lady. And yet her aging condition may be the least of her problems. Forced to maneuver family secrets, borderline personalities, and possible felony charges, Kim is determined to find happiness in a world where not even time is on her side.
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November 10, 2022
Every once in a while, as a critic, you get to witness all the stars align–writing, acting, directing, and design–to create an absolutely flawless musical. I am very happy to report that Kimberly Akimbo is one of those, a perfect production of a perfect musical.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 10, 2022
Being a former good kid — and, like Seth, an aficionado of “the puzzleistic arts” — I began to see the character and the show in anagrammatic terms. (Possibly this one: sublime cast = best musical.) As the past and the present interpenetrate in Clark’s performance, you may feel, as I did, the themes of “Kimberly Akimbo” recombining to achieve an even sharper focus.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 10, 2022
This new musical from the delightfully unhinged minds of David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori uses silliness as a weapon — one that can cut through preconceived notions about the meaning of life and stitch them back together in the same movement.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 10, 2022
November 10, 2022
Tweaked in several ways—including a superior Act One finale—the show works even better than it did before: It still feels intimate, but the larger audience lets the show land big laughs as well as moments of stung collective sympathy, and the performances pop with fresh energy.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 10, 2022
It asks big questions about family and mortality. It’s unabashedly heartfelt and irresistibly funny. Like life, it’s inherently sad and a little absurd, and like its subject, “Kimberly Akimbo” is exceedingly rare and almost impossible not to love.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 10, 2022
“Kimberly Akimbo” is a feel-good show that acknowledges feelings of heartbreak, nausea, and discord. It brings to mind “Fun Home,” which also has music by Tesori, is based on unlikely source material, and explores an unconventional family and a pained adolescence. It honors the Sondheim dictum of “content dictates form,” creating a work that is well-integrated, fresh, quirky, and heartfelt, but not flashy or over-the-top.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 10, 2022
But they dug in for Broadway, reinvestigating every moment and making tiny surgical changes to help the material achieve its fullest comic and tragic potential. Kimberly Akimbo was lovely before; it’s magnificent now.
READ THE REVIEWChris
Jones
November 10, 2022
It’s a great truth that acting is not so much about people but people in motion. And that’s what is so enthralling about the luminous work of both Clark and Cooley. As is the case with Tesori’s roiling score, their work here is kinetic. They throw out their hearts on to a cruel wind and hope for at least a little gust in their sails, before the tempest that awaits us all.
Beautiful.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 10, 2022
Opening tonight at the Booth Theatre with its original Off Broadway cast intact, the miraculous Victoria Clark leading the very fine ensemble, Kimberly Akimbo remains a stunner, a sly, quirky, eccentric work of stage art transformed into a crowd pleaser by playwright David Lindsay-Abaire’s captivating book and lyrics, Jeanine Tesori’s delightful music that, like Kimberly Akimbo itself, works its way into your heart with a jauntiness that both hides and ultimately amplifies its serious ambitions.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 10, 2022
It’s still funny and quirky and very off-center, but the story of a rapidly aging 16-year-old girl and her deadbeat family has been grounded. No, not grounded in a high school sort of way. Jeanine Tesori’s music grounds the story in a way that gives the source material resonance, makes it more substantial and far more emotionally engaging.
READ THE REVIEWChristian
Holub
November 10, 2022
Kimberly Akimbo leaves you floating high on good vibes and ready to make the most of life.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 10, 2022
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 proven wrong.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 10, 2022
Transferring intact to Broadway, this small-scale charmer has not only retained but enriched its distinctive qualities, sweeping in as a burst of invigorating originality in a sea of repurposed movies, jukebox compilations and revivals.
READ THE REVIEWCharles
Isherwood
November 10, 2022
A family mired in dysfunction. A young woman facing a terminal diagnosis. Teenage angst. Teenage romance. An eccentric aunt. These familiar and potentially hackneyed elements combine, in a nigh-wondrous feat of theatrical legerdemain, to bring to Broadway the best musical of the year so far, by far: the breathtakingly lovely and often riotously funny “Kimberly Akimbo.”
READ THE REVIEWJoe
Dziemianowicz
November 10, 2022
She’s back! Following an Off-Broadway run that wrapped in January, Kimberly Akimbo is now in residence at the Booth Theatre with the original cast and every bit of its wondrous quirkiness intact. In fact, the show is more polished and endearing than before.
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