Review: Broadway is a bloodbath for new musicals right now - but Kimberly Akimbo deserves a long life

Alli Mauzey, left, and Victoria Clark star in Kimberly Akimbo, in which Clark plays a teenager with a rare aging disease.Joan Marcus/The Associated Press

Broadway was a bloodbath this fall. The Phantom of the Opera, which once seemed as immovable in Manhattan as Central Park, announced it was closing after 35 years; Come From Away and Dear Evan Hanson, twin hits of the 2016-2017 season, wrapped up runs one week after another.

Most concerningly, A Strange Loop, Michael R. Jackson’s idiosyncratic, envelope-pushing and ultimately gut-wrenching metamusical about a Black queer composer-lyricist, announced a final performance for Jan. 15. That will make it the third shortest-running Best Musical winner since the Tony Awards began.

Into this harsh environment, brand new shows have launched and flailed without the US$10-million-a-show grants from the federal government that helped Broadway reboot in fall 2021. (KPOP, an original musical that hoped to capitalize on the titular genre’s trending popularity, closed more quickly than any new musical since 2009.)

Larry Owens, centre, stars in the musical A Strange Loop at Playwrights Horizons in New York in 2019. The show announced a final performance for Jan. 15.SARA KRULWICH/The New York Times News Service

I’m hoping that Kimberly Akimbo (Critic’s Pick) – the musical that seems like this year’s Tony front-runner, now on at the Booth Theatre – makes a longer go of it, despite a premise that might scare some away.

On one level, I suppose you could call it a traditional teen musical in the mould of Grease or Mean Girls: Kimberly Levaco (Victoria Clark) is the new girl at her New Jersey high school, about to celebrate her sweet 16, and trying to figure out how to fit in.

But the twist is this: She also has a rare rapid-aging disease with an average life expectancy of 16.

Too much of a bummer for Broadway? Not at all – I was utterly charmed by this off-kilter comedy with a rich score full of delightful surprises by Jeanine Tesori (Caroline, or Change, Fun Home).

Set in 1999 and adapted by David Lindsay-Abaire from his own play, the musical has the quirky sensibility and big heart of indie film comedies of the aughts like Little Miss Sunshine and Juno.

Kimberly has a dysfunctional family headed by a hypochondriac mother (Alli Mauzey), now pregnant again, and a father (Steven Boyer) who is a frazzled alcoholic. A new baby and booze are their ways of coping with a difficult reality.

At school, meanwhile, Kimberly’s interactions are mostly with a group of geeks and nerds – the four members of an underfunded show choir, who are in an equilaterally unrequited love quadrangle, and an awkward boy obsessed with anagrams named Seth (Justin Cooley), who becomes her unlikely love interest.

It’s Kim’s aunt Debra (Bonnie Milligan) who connects these spheres – showing up with her latest absurd, illegal scheme to get rich quick, an idea that appeals to all.

Kimberly Akimbo comes at adolescence from a different perspective than most of teen-obsessed American pop culture. There’s no sex, no drugs, not really much angst. For the geeks, high school isn’t a microcosm of society but a purgatory they must pass through before their lives really begin.

Kimberly’s awareness of her own imminent mortality is placed in poignant counterpoint to this – as are the stunted lives of her parents.

Clark, back on Broadway for the first time since she starred in Sousatzka in Toronto, is 63 but you simply stop thinking of her as anything but 16 after a couple of scenes; it’s a fascinating performance that somehow blends in even as it physically stands out.

With its snowy, winter setting, a central hang-out that is a skating rink and a humanist sense of humour, Kimberly Akimbo almost feels like a Canadian musical. The cast in director Jessica Stone’s unshowy, heartfelt Broadway production is endearing top to bottom – Cooley, Mauzey and Boyer, in particular; while I want it to last in New York, I also can’t wait to see actors take it on up here.

Some Like It Hot, now on at the Shubert Theatre with a big, brassy score by Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman (Hairspray), is a new musical I feel more lukewarm about.

Movie-inspired musicals are not a new phenomenon; what does seem to be a contemporary trend, however, is adapting pre-existing IP into musicals that seem critical of or uncomfortable with their source material (see Paradise Square last season). You sense development processes that ran into real-world societal change.

Christian Borle, left, and J. Harrison Ghee, right, perform in Some Like It Hot. The two musicians disguise themselves as Josephine and Daphne in order to escape Chicago with an all-female band.Marc J. Franklin/The Associated Press

Some Like It Hot begins as Billy Wilder’s 1959 film does: After witnessing a gangland slaying, musicians Joe (Christian Borle) and Jerry (J. Harrison Ghee) disguise themselves as Josephine and Daphne in order to escape Chicago with an all-female band.

But at this point, deviations from the original not only take place, but are explicitly flagged. For instance, both bandleader Sweet Sue (the wonderful NaTasha Yvette Williams) and her star singer Sugar (Adrianna Hicks) are now Black – and so the band doesn’t head to Florida, but rather to California.

“It’s 1933, look at me,” says Sue when her sidekick suggests touring to the other place.

The biggest evolution from the film is that Daphne starts to find her true self – to, in the anachronistic dialogue, “feel seen” – in what started as a disguise. This is touching in Ghee’s sweet performance – but I experienced a bit of whiplash between this part of the show and its screwball elements.

The comic highs mainly come from the outrageous physical comedy from the actor Kevin Del Aguila as Osgood, a rich man who falls for Daphne.

Borle is funny too as Joe, the same wisecracking womanizer letching after Sugar from under his dress as he is in the movie – up to a point. In the second act, his character moves away from anything too stalker-ish – and starts to semi-atone for earlier antics. It’s not convincing.

When Daphne sings a rousing song about her newfound identity, Joe sits in silence at the end and the scene just stops as if the book writers (Matthew Lopez and Amber Ruffin) could no longer figure out what to do with him. When Daphne tries to come out to Osgood, meanwhile, he interrupts her, saying simply, “I know.”

Some Like It Hot seems to want to be about gender identity, just not really talk about it.

Despite regularly wondering “wait, why are they even doing this?” I did enjoy director Casey Nicholaw tap-happy production. He did do a better job of wrestling with pop culture past with The Drowsy Chaperone, though; it helped, in that case, that the past was made up for the occasion.