All hail, Victoria Clark!

 

Tony winner for The Light in the Piazza back in 2005, Clark has done solid work since, but she’s rarely gotten another juicy role—until now. Whatever its considerable shortcomings, the musical version of David Lindsay-Abaire’s play Kimberly Akimbo is worth seeing for Clark’s wonderfully humane performance in the eponymous role, as a teenager with progeria, which makes her body age more than four times faster than normal.

 

The original play didn’t cry out for musicalization. Lindsay-Abaire’s 2001 comic fable tried a tricky balancing act of absurdism and empathy, in the mode of Christopher Durang, only fitfully succeeding as it followed Kimberly’s travails with her dysfunctional family. 

 

For the musical, the archness seems to stick out more, and Jeanine Tesori’s songs feel as if they are pulling this weirdly schizophrenic story in antithetical directions. Tesori is not your typical Broadway composer, but her songs (with a couple exceptions) come off as standard show tunes that rather unconvincingly bump up against Kimberly’s bizarre life.

 

Jessica Stone’s directing has a tendency to highlight the strangeness embedded in the original play, which in effect diminishes Kimberly herself. For example, Kimberly’s aunt Debra was already overwritten, her manic proclivities writ large, but as overacted by Bonnie Mulligan, obviously nudged by Stone, it tips the scales too far, making Kimberly too often a spectator in her own story.

 

Pattie, Kimberly’s mother, is played by Alli Mauzey, also inclined to overact, but she at least seems like a woman angry with her lot in life. Conversely, Steven Boyer is subdued as Kimberly’s father, Buddy, which makes his faults all the more forgivable. His song about his daughter, “Happy for Her,” is one of the best in the show, illuminating rather than underlining what the playwright originally created. Of Kimberly’s high school friends (who weren’t in the original play), Justin Cooley is most memorable as Seth, Kimberly’s awkward suitor. 

 

But through it all hovers Clark, who never condescends to the fact that she’s a 63-year-old playing 15. Instead, she gives a profoundly touching portrayal that grounds even the show’s goofiest moments—like Debra’s ridiculous money-laundering scheme—in something approaching a plausible reality. Clark even makes the treacly sentiments of the climactic song, “Before I Go,” emotionally palatable. Without her, this show would be even more akimbo.