Tour Review: 'Kimberly Akimbo'
It's one of Broadway's best tours.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Kimberly is a teenager, although she looks like her own grandmother thanks to a rare genetic disorder that ages her rapidly. She’s celebrating her sweet sixteen while concerned with her inevitable premature death. At home, she has to juggle her alcoholic father, her unfortunately pregnant and often injured mother, and the schemes of her should-be ex-con aunt. At school, she’s the new kid (isn’t that hard enough?), making friends with the sexually confused show choir outcasts and developing a crush on the puzzle-enthusiast tuba player.
It doesn’t exactly sound like a feel-good show or one of the best shows you’ll see all year, and yet, somehow it’s both. That’s what makes the North American Tour of Kimberly Akimbo, a resident at D.C.’s National Theatre for the next two weeks, so spectacular — it’s the Tony winner that could, even though it really shouldn’t have.