Whether it's a coincidence or not, the handful of musicals that have meant the most to me over the past 20 years or so have all been by male and female writer/composer teams. Who knows - maybe there's something about the combination of perspectives and energies that gives Wicked, Caroline, or Change and The Light Princess their incredible, individual beauty and power.
Caroline's brilliant and original composer, Jeanine Tesori, again teams with a male playwright, David Lindsay-Abaire, on Kimberly Akimbo, which arrives in London after Broadway and Tony success. It's not this duo's first rodeo: they previously worked together on Shrek: The Musical. Kimberly, though, is a very different project: an intimate work, broadly similar to Caroline in its domestic settings and focus on working-class characters' struggles and strivings, and based on Lindsay-Abaire's 2001 play of the same name.
The show, which is not sung-through, doesn't, finally, approach Caroline's amazing reach and complexity. Lindsay-Abaire is not the writer Tony Kushner is at his best, and here difficult, complicated emotions often end up getting too easily smoothed over.
Still, Michael Longhurst's pleasing production has much to recommend it, especially the work of a delightful cast, headed by Maria Friedman, in a much-anticipated return to the stage after her successful recent years of directing. "I hope you start doing roles again and come back to doing theatre," Jonathan Groff said to Friedman two years ago in their gorgeous and inspiring conversation about their Merrily We Roll Along collaboration (and much more besides) below.
What's especially lovely is that Friedman hasn't returned in a musical that demands diva-ish grandstanding. Rather, it's one that gives her the opportunity to do what she does best: show her special skills as a company player and fully inhabit an original character through song.
The show's sparkling opening number, "Skater Planet" - one of its best: funny, perky but poignant (and how many opening songs get you reaching for the dictionary in their first lines - or maybe you already knew what a Zamboni is...) - sets us down at a Bergen County, New Jersey ice rink, established as a safe and happy space for a group of small-town teenage misfits.
On the fringes of the group, waiting for her tardy Dad to collect her, is Kimberly Levaco, a new girl recently moved into town from Lodi with her parents. Kimberly's burden is a rare and challenging one: she has a condition that causes premature ageing and, at 15, she looks closer to 70. The plot centres on her negotiations of traditional teenage issues - parental conflict, a first romance - with those specific to her appearance and knowledge of her brutally limited life expectancy.
On a compact yet slightly fussy Soutra Gilmour set, Longhurst's production spins us from the aforementioned ice rink, to Kimberly's split-level family home, from garage to school corridor, to hospital to wildlife park. To be honest, Lindsay-Abaire's plot - involving the return of Kimberly's shady Aunt Debra, keen to rope her niece's new friends into a money-making scam - is more than a little screwy, and it feels like it could have developed in a dozen more rewarding ways; a late-ish revelation about why the family left Lodi is a low point.
But Longhurst, a very sensitive director, helps the cast find the right emotional notes through the songs. These include Kimberly's "Make a Wish" - as unabashed an "I Want" number as you've ever heard in a show - and "Anagram" which interweaves her interior monologue about her feelings for her new friend Seth with his attempts to make an anagram of her name. Then there's the slightly hokey but irresistibly joyful first-half closer "This Time," which brings all the characters back to the rink for Kimberly's 16th birthday celebration.
Mixing pop, rock, soul and classical elements, Tesori's tunes don't spoonfeed the audience, which makes them all the more rewarding, especially as Lindsay-Abaire's lyrics - strongest at their most specific - sometimes tilt towards general uplift and 'seize the day' affirmations.
The music deepens the characters, though, including those like Kimberly's parents who initially seem to be uncaring comic foils, but who Peter Hannah, as the drunk, confrontational Dad, and Niamh Perry, as the pregnant Mum recording video messages for her unborn (because "I might be dead soon!!!") gradually invest with a few finer feelings.
Alice Fearn gets the lion's share of the laughs as the criminally-inclined Aunt, and her outlining of her modus operandi in "Better" is a show-stopping highlight. Relishing Matt Cole's choreography, the younger cast members also acquit themselves brilliantly, with Gilli Jones adorable as Seth - ice rink worker and wordsmith - and Ronav Jain, Aviva Tulley, Sara Hajizadeh and Robin Simões da Silva vivacious and hilarious as the chorus of misfit teens - even if an "unrequited love" running gag gets a bit too cute.
And Friedman invests even the fake-poignant moments with genuine emotion. It's a beautiful, open-hearted and totally fresh performance. Aided by Gilmour's great costumes - dig that Labyrinth sweater! - Friedman doesn't play a generalised "teen" but an individual, whose awkward slouch may equally indicate adolescence or older age.
Her Kimberly is kind, eager and perceptive but with a core of set-apartness; when she turns on her friends at the end of "Our Disease" - a class presentation novelty song turned lacerating - it's genuinely upsetting, the rawest, most discordant moment in a musical that's sometimes too keen to resort to feel-good homilies. Kimberly Akimbo is flawed, and it definitely won't be for those who like their musicals huge and glossy. But Longhurst's production finds the strengths of the show's tribute to seeing things "a little bit askew," and boasts a radiant central performance that goes straight to the heart.
Kimberly Akimbo is booking at Hampstead Theatre until 7 November. Further information here.
Production photos by Marc Brenner.
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