Review: KIMBERLY AKIMBO at Ohio Theatre

Able By Mom Rikki. Key Irk Mailbomb. Milky Bimbo Kare. Ak Bi Bilk Memory.

Chances are Seth Weetis, the anagram-obsessed friend in KIMBERLY AKIMBO, would have a field day with the show’s title. The two-act musical opened June 3 and runs through June 8 at the Ohio Theatre (39 E. State Street in downtown Columbus).

Anagrams are the perfect plot device for this quirky, coming of age musical. Written by Jeanine Tesori (music) and David Lindsay-Abaire (lyrics and book), the five Tony Award winning musical follows the path of Kimberly Levaco (Carolee Carmello), a 16-year-old who suffers from the fictional disease progeria-like syndrome that causes her body to age 4.5 years at a time. Like anagrams, Levaco’s life seems to be out of order and rarely makes sense.

Levaco is coping with a drunken father Buddy (Brandon Springman), a hypochondriac mother Pattie (Laura Woyasz) and an immoral Aunt Debra (Emily Koch). After her family abruptly moves to Bergen County, N.J. under shady circumstances, she must adjust to a new high school, find new friends, and deal with a quickly diminishing life span. When she turns 16 near the middle of the first act, Levaco’s body is actually 72.

Yet through it all, Kimberly maintains a sense of guarded optimism. In “Make A Wish,” she makes three requests to the Make a Wish Foundation of New Jersey, knowing only one of her dreams will be fulfilled. After wishing to be a super model for a day or to have an outlandish yacht cruise with 40 friends, she wants something heartbreakingly simple: “(a) home-cooked meal, a table set for three/They'll ask me how my day was. I'll mention science class/We'll end with cherry cheesecake and a little Mel Torme.” Realizing this dream is probably too much to ask for, Kimberly settles for asking for a treehouse … even though her backyard is devoid of trees.

Even though she is far closer to Kimberly’s accelerated age of 72 than to being her character’s actual age, Carmello miraculously channels the heart of a 16-year-old. She captures the mannerisms, quirks, dreams, and fears of a high school student. In an interview with BroadwayWorld/Columbus, the three-time Tony Award nominee stated, “I wanted to make sure I didn’t sound like a woman in her 60s trying to play a teenager. I want the audience to forget I’m an older lady and follow the story of this teenage girl.”

Mission accomplished.

Yet to make the unconventional premise work, KIMBERLY AKIMBO follows the John Hughes School of Thought for making a believable, yet entertaining story involving teenagers. Hughes’ movies like THE BREAKFAST CLUB or SIXTEEN CANDLES require three elements: a quirky Best Friend, an inner circle of oddball friends and a distant family.

KIMBERLY AKIMBO has all three.

QUIRKY Best Friend

Having an eccentric buddy to provide a moral compass is one of the key elements in great shows about teenagers. Think Jon Cryer’s Duckie to Molly Ringwald’s Andi in PRETTY IN PINK, Alan Ruck’s Cameron to Matthew Broderick’s Ferris in FERRIS BUEHLER’S DAY OFF or Shannon Purser’s Barb to Natalia Dyer’s Nancy in STRANGER THINGS.

In KIMBERLY, it’s Seth Weetis (Miguel Gil). Weetis, a social outcast who leaches on to Kimberly for a friendship/romance as well as help on a looming science project, serves as the head in the musical.

Gil is a gem in this role, capturing the skittishness and voice modulation of an awkward adolescent outsider. His character Seth is no stranger to hardship. His mother died at an early age, his brother is in rehab, and his father, like Kimberly’s, is a remote figure.

His life of anagrams and tuba playing is turned upside down as he, Kimberly, and their four-person inner circle become hooked up in one of Debra’s schemes. In the song, “Good Kid,” Gil brings out Seth’s inner conflict as he sings, “What has it gotten me, being good?/Maybe a little bad could do a lot of good./Consider Frodo Baggins. Consider Robin Hood/…The wrong thing, the right choice, in the long run.” When the music breaks, Seth then punctures the silence with a hopelessly out-of-tune tuba solo.

INNER CIRCLE OF ODDBALLS

One of the high points of the show is the work of Darron Hayes, Pierce Wheeler, Bailey Ryon, and Grace Capeless. The four serve as sort of a Greek chorus, helping connect the dots in the script. Martin Doaty (Hayes), Aaron Puckett (Wheeler), Teresa Benton (Ryon), and Delia McDaniels (Capeless) go from being “the other kids” at the Skating Rink to being Kimberly’s inner circle after they are drawn into one of Debra’s get-rich-illegally schemes.

The four try to navigate their personal love parallelogram. Martin is infatuated with Aaron, who is in love with Delia, who wants to be with Teresa, who wants to get past the friend zone with Martin. Debra squelches any sort of budding romances with a brutal but accurate assessment: “You’re smart kids, but not the most intuitive, so let’s just nip this in the bud,” she says as she then points to each kid. “Straight-gay-straight-gay. We done? If I’m wrong, someone speak up.”

These four are the show’s soul, complimenting the heart of Kimberly and the head of Weetis. Often actors struggle when they are asked to play characters a half-decade younger than they are. This quartet, Hayes in particular, make their performances believable. Walk down the hall of any high school and you will see reflections of these four.

A DISTANT FAMILY

If Kimberly is the heart, Weetis the head, and the limited circle of friends the soul, Kimberly’s family is the lower intestine. They produce a lot of crap Kimberly must deal with.

At best Kimberly’s parents are about as much as a factor in her life as Charlie Brown’s mom and dad. In fact, they might be worse. Brown’s mom and dad are invisible beings whose only voice is a wah-wah sound. Pattie and Buddy are hurtful and self-centered but their influence is constantly visible.

Springman, stepping into the spotlight as Buddy from his understudy role, is strong as a constant disappointment to his daughter. At one point, he appears to have won passes to Six Flags amusement park, a promise he has continually made to his daughter over the years, from a bar bet.  Kimberly’s brief exhilaration ends when she discover the tickets expired two years ago. Later, when he discovers she is wearing makeup, he pronounces, “I don’t like it. You look like Nana at her wake!” eliciting a gasp from the audience.

Pattie is not much better on the likeability scale. After being a comic foil through most of the first act, Woyasz displays the darker side of her character in the song “The Inevitable Turn.” A perfect dinner is ruined by the revelation Pattie had sex with an elderly neighbor because she wanted to have a second child without her husband’s DNA. “I was scared,” she confesses. Kimberly quickly figures out what her mother is saying: “Scared it would be like me?”

It says a lot when the most likable person in Kimberly’s clan is a convicted felon who is trying to lure high school kids into committing forgery and mail fraud. Koch portrays Aunt Debra as a tough, no nonsense character. Above anything else, Debra is honest about who she is. In the song “Better,” one of the catchiest songs in the show, Debra details how she once married someone needing a green card for money and how she fooled a dementia patient into giving the con the rings off her fingers after Debra posed as the woman’s daughter. She justifies her behavior, singing “You gotta grab the good stuff before it's gone/'Cause once it's gone, it don't come back.”

If there is a weakness to KIMBERLY AKIMBO, it is in the soundtrack. A friend, who loved the show when she saw it on Broadway, was asked “what songs do you remember from it?” She drew a blank, saying, “well that was two years ago.” Musicals like SIX or HADESTOWN or HAMILTON have songs that stick in your subconscious forever. While KIMBERLY songs like “Better,” “How to Wash a Check,” and “Great Adventure” are clever and catchy, they’re so ingrained into the show you won’t find yourself humming them one or two years down the line. They are great in context, invisible outside of it.

That, in a way, mirrors the message of the show. Like KIMBERLY AKIMBO’s run at the Ohio Theatre, life is short and as “Great Adventure” reminds us: “Enjoy the ride.” (Or as Weetis would put it, Doni Jeer They.)