A Tight-Rope Walk to the Tony Awards: How ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ Creators Struck a Delicate Balance of Humor and Heartache
The writers of “Kimberly Akimbo” tell a story about the musical’s creation that feels as if it could be a scene in the show itself. Like the Tony-nominated production, now up for eight awards including best musical, it’s a tale that lands right in the overlap of humor and heartache.
In the summer of 2017, just before composer Jeanine Tesori and bookwriter-lyricist David Lindsay-Abaire were scheduled to spend two weeks developing the first act of “Kimberly Akimbo” at the Sundance Theatre Lab, Tesori had a cerebral hemorrhage. She was in the ICU for 11 days, the Tony-winning composer (“Fun Home”) recalled. She missed the entire first week of the show’s time at Sundance.
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Then, a few days after her arrival and following a day of work on “Kimberly,” she and Lindsay-Abaire (“Rabbit Hole”) went looking for a corkscrew in their Sundance housing. Lindsay-Abaire, temporarily forgetting that maybe a woman recovering from a brain bleed shouldn’t be subjected to any sudden frights, playfully jumped out from behind a door to scare her. It worked so well she fell over.
Tesori was fine, but in that moment, the absurd and the existential collided. Both of them, they recalled, dissolved into a combination of laughter and tears and terror.
“I’ve never laughed so hard, or felt so scared,” Lindsay-Abaire said. “That’s our show.”
It’s that delicate balance, right on the line between funny and wistful, that “Kimberly Akimbo” aims to strike. For the show’s producing and creative team, capturing and maintaining that tone has proven a key concern over its eight-year road to Broadway and the Tony Awards.
At Sundance, for instance, the musical opened with a number that both Tesori and Lindsay-Abaire recall fondly. But they opted to cut it because, they said, its serious, sad mood didn’t convey the humor that they always imagined as central to the project.
Based on Lindsay-Abaire’s 2001 play, the intimately scaled “Kimberly Akimbo” follows a teenager who suffers from a rare, fictional disease that causes her body to age so rapidly that she looks like a woman in her 60s. (Tony winner Victoria Clark leads the cast of nine, starring as Kimberly in a performance that’s earned her a nomination for leading actress in a musical.) Set just as Kimberly is coming to the end of the 16-year lifespan that doctors predicted for her, the musical sees its protagonist, and all her family and friends, learn to carpe the diem before it’s gone.
By the time “Kimberly Akimbo” went to Sundance, the musical’s lead commercial producer, David Stone, had already signed on. Currently nominated for Tonys for both “Kimberly” and his recent revival of “Topdog/Underdog,” Stone had gotten to know Tesori in 2004, when both his production of “Wicked” and her musical “Caroline, or Change” were among that year’s nominees for best musical. (The trophy went to “Avenue Q.”) After the pair then collaborated on a project that Stone eventually had to step away from, Tesori kept the producer in mind as someone she wanted to work with in the future.
The musical that she and Lindsay-Abaire brought him was one that grew out of the working relationship the composer and the playwright-lyricist had formed during “Shrek the Musical,” which opened on Broadway in 2008. Wanting to collaborate on a project with fewer external pressures than a high-stakes stage translation of a Hollywood studio’s IP, the writer-composer team began work on “Kimberly” because, Tesori said, “It’s like David’s words are waiting for music. ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ was a musical when he wrote it, and we just helped it along.”
After she and Lindsay-Abaire brought the idea to Stone over dinner in September of 2015, the producer funded a demo recording of five songs (four of which, Stone noted, are still in the show) in the summer of 2016. After Sundance, a formal read-through of a full first draft followed in 2018, and then a 29-hour developmental reading later that year.
“It was those early days that David kept us on track without derailing us,” Lindsay-Abaire said. “He would nudge us in the right direction without hovering.”
Director Jessica Stone (no relation to David Stone), another of the show’s Tony nominees, joined the project in 2019 for a two-week rehearsal and staged reading in the spring, and then a four-week work session that fall. The actor-turned-director had impressed Lindsay-Abaire when she helmed a 2017 production of his play “Ripcord” at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston.
“I knew from ‘Ripcord’ that Jessica understands the weird tone that Jeanine and I share, which is that, oh, comedy and tragedy can live right next to each other,” Lindsay-Abaire said. “Finding that balance where you can turn on a hairpin like that is hard, and when you find a director who can do it, it’s like a gift.”
Off Broadway’s Atlantic Theatre Company, where “Kimberly Akimbo” would eventually premiere, signed on to the project after the spring 2019 reading, but just as a production timeline began to shape up the pandemic intervened. While its writers continued to develop the show remotely through 2020 and into 2021, the musical was eventually scheduled to debut at the Atlantic in an Off Broadway staging that ran from November 2021 through January of the following year.
In the estimation of all the show’s creators, audience response to “Kimberly Akimbo” was informed by the collective trauma of the pandemic, making the musical’s themes of the fragility of life, and of seizing its ephemeral joys while you can, land with new urgency. “It felt healing, and it never felt sad,” Stone said. “I think that’s the magic trick that these guys have pulled off. The show isn’t about mortality. It’s about life and what we do with the time we have and how we treat each other while we’re here.”
The Atlantic production earned top musical awards from the Drama Desk, the Lortels and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, which launched the show forward to Broadway. In November of 2022, “Kimberly Akimbo” opened at the Booth Theater, the 775-seat Broadway house where Stone had produced award-winning productions of “Next to Normal” and “The Boys in the Band.”
Between the Atlantic and Broadway, Lindsay-Abaire and Tesori did a full rewrite that honed dialogue, motivations and action. “We went word by word,” Tesori recalled. “Punctuation, stage directions. It took weeks and weeks. It was scary. I didn’t want to bust it.”
Meanwhile, the bigger venue and the Broadway budget (a still relatively modest $7 million) allowed director Jessica Stone to rethink elements of the staging beyond the confines of the Atlantic’s smaller theater — even as the entire creative team worked to avoid over-amplifying the show’s intimacy.
“There are some important themes in the show that we couldn’t convey physically at the Atlantic,” she said. “We couldn’t really play around with feeling trapped and then breaking out, that feeling of contraction and expansion. But we can do that more now that we have a few Broadway bells and whistles.”
“Kimberly Akimbo” heads into the Tony Awards as a critical and awards-season favorite in a race that also includes “Some Like It Hot,” “Shucked” and “& Juliet.” Although the exact specifics of the ceremony remain cloudy, “Kimberly” will, like all the nominated musicals, get a valuable showcase on the CBS telecast that will help promote the show in advance of a national tour in 2024.
Tesori, Lindsay-Abaire and David Stone all have long histories with the Tonys. All three have racked up multiple nominations; Tesori won for her score to “Fun Home” and Stone won for his revival of “Boys in the Band.” They admit that awards can be undeniably meaningful. “The only thing I want to give David Stone is a Tony Award, because it’s deserved and because of his unbelievable dedication to the theater community,” Tesori said.
But their experiences have also given each of them a long view. As Lindsay-Abaire noted cheerfully, “I’ve lost enough times that now I’m really just trying to enjoy it all.”
“The legacy isn’t the award, it’s the show,” David Stone added. “It’s this thing we made that’s going to go out in the world and get done and seen for years.”
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