Kimberly Akimbo

Kimberly Akimbo has book and lyrics by the Pulitzer-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire and music by Jeanine Tesori, adapting Lindsay-Abaire's own 2000 play (world premiere at South Coast Repertory in 2001; New York, at Manhattan Theatre Club, in 2003). The musical opened Off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2021, transferred to Broadway in 2022, and closed in April 2024 after 612 performances. Its national tour finished crossing the country in May, 2026.

The story: Kimberly Levaco is turning sixteen with a progeria-like disease that ages her at four-to-five times the normal rate, so she has the body of a woman in her seventies and a life expectancy of about sixteen years. Around her: a first love, a family coming apart, and a felony scheme. That premise is the hook. The claim of this reading is that the show's real subject, underneath the plot, is mediation—which makes media ecology a helpful way to explore it.

The central conceit—a sixteen-year-old who reads as seventy—literalizes Neil Postman's disappearance of childhood. Postman argued that print invented childhood by putting adult knowledge behind a wall of literacy, and that electronic media tore the wall down, leaving us with children who know everything and adults who know nothing more. Kim's body simply performs the argument: the protected interval between child and adult has collapsed into a single frame.

And it is not only Kim. The show's governing metaphors are all acts of inscription, erasure, and reassembly. Kim is being erased by her own genetic code. Her aunt Debra runs a check-washing scheme—literally dissolving one identity off a document to write in another. Seth, an anagram enthusiast, rearranges “Kimberly Levaco” into cleverly akimbo, naming her out-of-true self. Even the setting is a Baudrillardian sequence of simulations: we begin in an artificial ice rink and end, by way of a safari park, Colonial Williamsburg, and Graceland, at Disney World.

Kim enters as the new girl who gets to “start from scratch.” Something bad happened back in Lodi, something involving Debra, but her parents decide she is better off not knowing—one more adult secret held just out of reach, in a show about the vanishing of exactly those secrets.

Her decisive turn is a refusal of mediated wish-fulfillment. When the Make-a-Wish Foundation offers to build her a treehouse, she declines the gift and chooses instead to go and see the world for herself. Read ecologically, Kim stands in for all of us: skaters on a digital planet, nursing what Lewis Mumford would have called a paleotechnic hangover—still running on the coal-smoke habits of an earlier machine age—and trying to climb out of the hole those habits dug.

Before a word is spoken, we see a video projection: a New Jersey sky, crossed with utility wires, with clouds moving through it. Couple that with the Playbill's pointed note that the show is set in the years before cell phones, and the creative team has told you how to read everything that follows.

This is McLuhan's the medium is the message staged as a curtain: the first thing we register is not content but an apparatus—a screen, a projection, a landscape already strung with the wires of an older communications grid. In the touring production, where the orchestra is in the pit rather than risers upstage, behind the set is a physical utility pole and wires that looms over the action for the entire show. We are being reminded, wordlessly, that what we are watching is a story about mediated realities.

The town has no name. Six teenagers navigate not-fitting-in: Kim; Seth, a geeky wordsmith and tuba player who sees her clearly; and a Show Choir who form a romantic quadrilateral—Martin, Aaron, Teresa, and Delia—meeting at the rink, playing UNO in the library, rehearsing a Motown routine. Buddy drinks; Pattie is pregnant, hypochondriac, and hiding a secret; aunt Debra arrives with a check-washing scam and pulls the kids in. Act II runs from the scheme through a family dinner that detonates the Levacos' secret, to Kim's collapse and, finally, a road trip toward the horizon.

Two details to file away now, because they carry the argument. First, the town's namelessness is an erasure: in the original play the town is Bogota, New Jersey, and a faint stencil of that name survives on a prop later on. Second, the kids play UNO—where the play had them playing Dungeons & Dragons. Hold that substitution; we will return to it, because it is the whole thesis in miniature.

The first image is Kim alone in the dark, deliberately biting a bead off a candy necklace. A media ecologist can hardly help hearing an echo of Cadmus's teeth—the myth in which sown dragon's teeth spring up as armed men, long read as a fable of the phonetic alphabet, those small, identical, repeatable units from which whole worlds are assembled. The candy beads are letters; they are also the base pairs of her akimbo DNA. Both codes, alphabetic and genetic, are discrete, recombinable, and, in her case, misspelled.

Then the lights rise on an ice rink and the Show Choir sings “Skater Planet.” Why skating? Because it is friction reduced almost to zero—a controlled, contained environment where you can be poised and graceful in a way school never allows, and try on a self you cannot wear outside. The rink is the show's first simulation, a cool and frictionless surface over a colder reality.

Next we find Kim as a literal outsider, waiting in the cold for her forgetful, inebriated father and the car. The weather does the work of the pathetic fallacy, deepening her isolation. Buddy has won a Game Boy in a bar bet; Kim expertly blows into the cartridge to make it work—a small, exact period gesture, the analog ritual of a pre-network childhood. Seth doubles back for his tuba and offers to let them warm up inside: his “save the cat” moment, the beat that makes us root for him.

“Skater Planet” is the thesis in a hook. The show will move from rink to safari park to Disney World, and the song has already told us what that progression means: we are all skaters on a thin, mediated layer of ice over reality, melting under the blades of our own words. (Keep an ear on the phrase “book a party”; it is foreshadowing.)

Home is a quiet disaster. Both parents work hard to present as good parents and fail in real time. Pattie gets “Father Time,” a number that is at once a wish to rewind Kim back to babyhood and a hope pinned on the unborn Carmelita (one anagram of whose name, fittingly, is All Envy America). Buddy gets the comic patter song “Happy for Her,” ruminating from the driver's seat about what Seth might want from his daughter—the very thing he once wanted, and got, from Pattie in high school.

The house runs on brand-name simulations of nourishment. In this New Jersey, even the Ding-Dongs are fake: the off-brand snack cake stands in for a whole economy of copies without originals, comfort food that only resembles comfort. Baudrillard would recognize the pantry.

Kim is one of the children of the postindustrial age whose parents cannot meet the moment. Her father can drive but has to be helped to bed; her mother, hands bandaged from double carpal-tunnel surgery, has to be fed like an infant. The roles have inverted—this is the clinical figure of the parentified child, the kid who parents the parents—and it is Postman's collapsed boundary again, this time as family logistics.

The scene is thick with recording devices. Pattie sings “Hello, Darling” into a borrowed camcorder, taping a message for her unborn daughter. As Tesori has noted, in the 1990s self-recording was still a deliberate, unusual act rather than the ambient archiving we do now; the show keeps handing that camcorder around like a talking stick. Kim answers with her own “I want” number, “Make a Wish,” a letter to the Foundation that runs through the whole range of her imagined desires before landing, heartbreakingly, on the wish for an ordinary family dinner.

In the library, Kim and Seth plan a biology presentation on disease and choose hers. Seth offers to make an anagram of her name, and the song “Anagram” turns the exercise into a small manifesto: with the turn of a letter, everything can be made better. This is the recombinatory power of writing set to music—the alphabetic promise that a fixed reality can be re-spelled into a different one.

There is a lovely production fact buried here. The rapid-fire, jazz-poet verbal exploration that solves the anagram is a simulation of Lindsay-Abaire: Tesori had him perform an anagram live, taped it, and built the song around the tape. "Even the shouting," as Tesori told Playbill. Every performance therefore contains a hyperreal recreation of the author writing—in a song about inscription.

Seth is identified with writing. He is the anagrammatist, the puzzle-solver, the boy who reorganizes the world on paper, and he carries the temperament that Ong and McLuhan attribute to literacy: analytic, distancing, cool. Writing lets you hold experience at arm's length and take it apart; Seth's whole way of loving Kim is to spell her differently, to find the order hidden in her disorder.

This is worth dwelling on, because Seth is where the adaptation performs its cleanest media-ecological maneuver. In the original play the boy is not Seth the anagrammatist at all. He is Jeff—a Dungeon Master. That change, from a figure of oral, improvised storytelling to a figure of literate, written recombination, is not a detail. It is the argument. The next panel is its spotlight.

Debra crashes in right after “Anagram”—a barbarian in the library—and offers a rival route to the same word, better, in a big, belting Broadway number. If Seth's “better” is achieved by rearranging letters, Debra's is achieved by rearranging people: forging identities, working an angle, moving money. Two technologies of transformation, the pen and the con, meet over the same card table.

In “Better,” Debra lays out a life lived as tactical impersonation—playing the grieving widow, the devoted daughter, whatever a mark needs to see—in order to get paid. Her famous corrective to the old proverb sets the tone: when life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade; go steal some apples, because who wants lemons? Identity, for Debra, is not something you have but something you deploy: a fund of Baudrillardian personae, copies with no original, cashed as needed. She is the show's theorist of simulation, and its most alive character.

Act I ends with a big production number, "This Time." Everyone is briefly aligned: the parents promising to be better, Kim agreeing to join the check-washing scheme, the Show Choir signing on for costume money and a shot at the state competition. It is the only moment the entire cast is on stage together within the story, and it is marked by an old disposable party camera—a pre-selfie selfie, nostalgic even in 1999, a way of recording a togetherness the family cannot otherwise sustain.

Notice, too, the show's recurring motif of the broken heart made literal: a heart attack in Lodi, Kim's cardiac crisis to come in Act II, Pattie's collapse in a Panera. The organ that stands for feeling keeps failing as a physical machine—emotion rendered, repeatedly, as hardware.

The Show Choir are defined by their crushes, their odd outsider traits, and their socially-mediated dreams—perfect marriage, happy home—which are precisely the futures Kim will not live to have. Early in Act II they reprise those dreams while she sits with them in the library playing UNO, and it lands like a blow. Tesori describes two different clocks in the show: a plot clock that starts when Kim commits to the scheme, and a deeper story clock that starts right here—the moment, over a hand of cards, when Kim truly registers how little time she has.

Look at how these teenagers use media. Their lockers, and Kim's bedroom wall, are papered with images and idols—an ambient culture of pictures and imagined selves. And note the stage grammar: all the skating happens in Act I. The frictionless rink belongs to the half of the show that still believes in escape; Act II makes them work.

This is a piece of the show's own social-media marketing: a three-by-three grid that sorts the characters into a tidy typology—the kind of “which one are you?” matrix built to be screenshotted and shared. It is a small, telling artifact. A story about people whose inner lives are painfully out of sync with their outward selves is here selling itself back to us as a set of clean, collectible identities.

Scholars of the American musical (David Savran and colleagues, writing on Tesori and Lindsay-Abaire's earlier Shrek) have described how the contemporary musical learns to brand difference—to package the outsider as a marketable position. The grid is that logic in miniature: the hyperreal reaching out of the show and onto your feed, turning characters into avatars you can pick.

Act II opens with Debra's master class, “How to Wash a Check.” It is worth inventorying the technologies she deploys, because the number is practically a syllabus in media: the postal system, fishing line and glue traps to fish envelopes out of a mailbox, a photocopier to make a reference image, and chemical solvents to lift the ink so the check can be rewritten in Seth's name and cashed with Kim disguised as his grandmother. Every step is an operation on a document—boosting, copying, erasing, re-inscribing. The check-washing scam is identity theft rendered as literal media processing.

The staging hides a beautiful point about orality. The kids are hopeless when they try to follow linear instructions; they only succeed once they take up the task as if they were singing it, each taking a part, working as an ensemble. This is Ong's secondary orality in action—the electronic-age return of communal, performed knowing that nonetheless sits on top of the written procedure. (And watch for the stencil on the photocopier: “BHS,” Bogota High School—the last surviving trace of the town the musical erased.)

In “Our Disease,” the kids present diseases for biology class: scurvy (Aaron and Martin) and fasciolosis, a parasitic infection (Delia and Teresa). The pairing is a neat little emblem of the show's obsession with too-little and too-much: scurvy is what happens when life doesn't give you lemons; fasciolosis is what happens to Delia's father from eating watercress by the bushel. Both are conditions of the invisible—the missing vitamin, the microscopic parasite—made visible only through the mediating instruments of science.

Track the descent through media eras in this stretch. We fall from the technologically assisted fantasy of the rink (if only life had a Zamboni to resurface it), through the chemistry-set complexity of the basement, down to the genuinely antique tech of the classroom—notecards, an overhead projector, acetate transparencies. When Seth and Kim finally give their presentation, they step out from behind the overhead: they drop the apparatus and speak as themselves. And the whole scene asks us to see school as a medium in its own right—an age-appropriate filter placed between children and the world, which is another of Postman's central themes.

The middle of Act II is the dark night of the soul. The family secrets spill—where babies like her sister come from, how a kindly old neighbor from Lodi actually died—and Kim is forced to absorb the difficult knowledge of adulthood all at once. It sends her to the hospital. Postman's collapse becomes a plot event: the last withheld secrets fall, and with them the last of childhood.

Still set on the scheme, Kim has to impersonate Seth's grandmother to cash the checks. The disguise stages the show's deepest question as pure theatrical image. An actress in her seventies plays a sixteen-year-old who now dresses as an old woman—so which layer is the costume? When a body already reads as elderly puts on elderliness as a disguise, authenticity stops being locatable. There is no undisguised Kim to return to.

Kim's eleven o'clock number, “Before I Go,” is the emotional summit. The heist done, she comes home hoping they can still be a family, realizes they have given up on her and on themselves, and gently asks her parents to accept the reality of her life and its nearing end. What she asks for, finally, is a change of perspective—and the parents' gift, delivered in reprised fragments of their own earlier songs, is permission: to let her go and live, even briefly. The song is a farewell that is also a launch.

The finale, “Great Adventure,” sends everyone forward. The Show Choir get their spangly costumes; Buddy and Pattie hold baby Carmelita; Debra turns up in a Costco vest, having made her peace with honest work. Kim and Seth escape Bergen County and run the East Coast's hyperreal circuit—and this time they hold the controls: Kim has the video camera, Seth is at the wheel. The camcorder that was passed around all evening has finally reached her hands.

The hook, “Great Adventure,” names a real place—Six Flags Great Adventure, the New Jersey theme park—so even the escape route runs through manufactured wonder. (Lindsay-Abaire told Playbill the song was written as he and his wife were saying goodbye to a dying friend; its buoyancy is hard-won.) One need not spell out what Baudrillard would say about the show's last image: Kim, smiling, at Disney World—the hyperreal chosen not as a trap now but as a destination, a girl who wanted to see the world ending up at the world's most perfect copy of one.