Kimberly Levaco is not like other girls. This much is obvious from the first time we glimpse the hero of Kimberly Akimbo, lacing up her skates at a small-town New Jersey ice rink. She is on the cusp of her 16th birthday, but you wouldn’t know this by looking: she is played by 66-year-old stage veteran Maria Friedman. Kimberly, we quickly learn, is a teenager with a rare, one-in-fifty-million disease, a genetic disorder similar to the real-world condition progeria, in which her body ages four to five times quicker than it ought to.
As you might imagine, there is an inherent melancholy to David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s stage musical, making its UK debut at the Hampstead Theatre after an acclaimed, Tony-winning run stateside. From the very first scene, Kimberly is a sort of doomed figure, a woman coming to the end of her life at the point when it’s meant to be starting. (The life expectancy for people with her condition is 16 years old.) She is surrounded by teenagers wrapped up in the frivolous concerns of adolescence, and adults – including Buddy (Peter Hannah), her deadbeat, booze-dipped dad, and Patty (Niamh Perry), her scatty, mercurial and heavily pregnant mother – who barely seem to have grown up themselves. Kimberly Akimbo mostly opts to keep things light, treating its premise with a kind of wry humour; if there’s such a thing as breezy morbidity, this show has it.
