Five months after a touring production of “The Addams Family” departed St. Paul’s Ordway Music Theater, another unpredictably off-the-wall family has come to visit. And they’re sharing the stage with the kind of quirky and painfully awkward teenagers that many pop culture offerings seek but fail to find.
They populate “Kimberly Akimbo,” a musical by playwright David Lindsay-Abaire and composer Jeanine Tesori that took home the “Best Musical” Tony and a host of other awards in 2023. And it’s a wonderfully weird show that strikes me as exactly what’s been needed to bust out of the increasingly narrow confines of “Broadway.”
Both hilarious and heartbreaking – the rare show I’ve attended at which audience members both roared and sobbed – it’s a quirky masterpiece of musical theater, an audaciously original dark comedy that benefits from exceptional performances from all nine of its actors. That’s right: A Broadway musical with only nine characters. But what memorably vivid characters they are.
Ann Morrison, left, who plays the title character, and Marcus Phillips in “Kimberly Akimbo,” a musical dark comedy about a high school student with a disease that rapidly ages her who has an eccentric family and group of friends. The North American touring production is at St. Paul’s Ordway Music Theater through March 1, 2026. (Courtesy of Joan Marcus)
At the center is Kimberly, who is turning 16, but suffers from an affliction that ages her body at four to five times the pace of a normal human. Hence, the end of her life expectancy is nigh, but she’s also finding a fresh beginning at a new high school, where she’s confronted with typical teen challenges like finding friends and assembling science projects. And atypical challenges like having her uproariously unfiltered serial criminal of an aunt hiding out in the school library and trying to get Kimberly and her friends involved in her latest fraud scheme.
And then there’s Kimberly’s home life, which features an emotionally and physically fragile mom preparing to give birth and an undependable alcoholic father. Yes, they’re exasperatingly flawed as parents, but they’re also wildly funny, especially when that unpredictable aunt comes through the window and gradually transforms this offbeat portrait of family and high school life into a caper comedy.
This North American tour played Minneapolis’ Orpheum Theatre last July, and I felt it to be one of the best theatrical experiences I had in 2025. But it’s evolved into an even better production, one that manages to be simultaneously outrageous and moving, carrying its conflicting emotional extremes with grace and nuance.
Director Jessica Stone has given the show a briskly engaging pace that slows enough to let its deepest emotions resonate. Skillfully carrying the tale as Kimberly is Ann Morrison, marvelously placing the qualities of a bubbly when not sulky teen in the voice and body of an older woman.
Her unreliable parents are fascinatingly fleshed out by Jim Hogan and Laura Woyasz. Yes, the characters can be frustratingly self-absorbed, but Hogan and Woyasz might summon up your sympathy for this pair that became parents too early and have never really gotten the hang of the job.
Marcus Phillips spearheads a spot-on quintet of classmates, each bursting with self-conscious awkwardness and a desire to be seen and understood. But no character in any Broadway musical of recent vintage is designed to steal scenes like Aunt Debra, and Emily Koch obliges with a bold, brassy portrayal that proves a key catalyst for the engaging spirit of this marvelous production.
Rob Hubbard can be reached at wordhub@yahoo.com.
‘Kimberly Akimbo’
When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 1:30 and 7 p.m. Sunday
Where: Ordway Music Theater, 345 Washington St., St. Paul
Tickets: $150-$45, available at 651-224-4222 or ordway.org
Capsule: A quirky masterpiece of modern musical theater.
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