The Stanley BFL Stage to May 3, 2026
Tickets from $29 at 604-687-1644 or www.artsclub.com
Posted April 14, 2026
Between the 2021 Off-Broadway production and the 2022 Broadway production, Kimberly Akimbo garnered forty-three award nominations including Best Musical, Best Original Score, Best Actress in a Musical, and Outstanding Broadway Musical. There were eight Tony nominations, with five wins including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score.
I don’t get it. Kimberly Akimbo is, at best, a quirky Theatre for Young Adults musical with an unremarkable score. Directed by Arts Club artistic director Ashlie Corcoran, this is a good production of an eminently forgettable show so the question remains: why this, why now? Well, with all those awards, the Arts Club probably figured they had a winner and maybe they do.
Credit: Moonrider Productions
There are some winners here: put Steffanie Davis on stage, let her sing “Hello, Darling” and hold on to your hat. Ditto Madeleine Suddaby who arguably has the best, but morally dubious, song, “How to Wash a Check”. Jason Sakaki does the sweetest, saddest rendering of “Now” and is, throughout, a touchstone of teenaged innocence and vulnerability. And, of course, there’s Lisa Horner as Kimberly who suffers from a rare disease that causes her to age four or five times faster than her peers; at going-on-sixteen, Kimberly already looks seventy, according to her friend Seth. Horner, at 55, does a fine job of behaving, talking and moving like a teenager, but (with lots of makeup) looks like a septuagenarian. Weirdly, there is almost no attention paid to Kimberly’s condition in Act 1 other than to make her an outsider in a group of four schoolmates (portrayed by Sarah Cantuba, Angella Cody, Joaquin Little and James Ross) who all see themselves as misfits.
Poor Kimblery has all the cards stacked against her: the disease that will probably kill her before the age of twenty, her narcissistic, pregnant mother Pattie (Steffanie Davis), her alcoholic father Buddy (Josh Epstein) and her ex-con, out-on-parole Aunt Debra (Madeleine Suddaby). What Kimberly does have going for her is nerdy, tuba-playing, faithful friend Seth (Jason Sakaki) and her own bravery and resilience in the face of her own imminent mortality.
And that, ultimately, is what Kimberly Akimbo is about: living in the moment when the moments are numbered as they are for us all – but sooner rather than later for Kimberly.
Live music under the direction of Caitlin Hayes. Appropriately grubby sort of opening set design by Pam Johnson – inside a skating rink, steel girders, lockers and benches, as well as rooms in Kimberly’s home, and the school library. Shelley Stewart Hunt choreographs the cast – wearing inline skates* – in several scenes. Why? I guess that’s where playwrights David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori decided to put them, thinking it might make things more interesting. Apparently, Lindsay-Abaire, in adapting his play to a musical, added the four other teenagers who don’t really have a lot to do with the plot other than learning how to steal cheques from mailboxes under the tutelage of Aunt Debra. None of the kids seems to think stealing cheques from mailboxes is an overly big problem. Lighting by Itai Erdal who has his own solo show – Soldiers of Tomorrow – coming up at the Cultch, May 6-10.
At curtain, the stranger sitting beside me asked, “What did you think?” “It’s the weirdest musical I’ve ever seen”, I responded. She was as underwhelmed as I was.
In its ‘Who Are We’ declaration on its website, the Arts Club claims, “We are scrappy, ingenious trailblazers who create powerful, intimate artistic experiences that make you feel fully alive.” Oh. Once again, the Arts Club has squandered the substantial talents of cast and design crew, to deliver something that, except for Kimberly calling her mother a “motherfucker” and wishing her dad would “drive into a tree and die”, might find a home at Carousel Theatre for Young People.
*Correction: The performers are actually wearing ice skates, not inline skates, that with some theatre magic and a “special substance” – as the publicist tells me – allows them to ‘ice skate’ on the Stanley stage.