Kimberly Akimbo Creators David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori on How the Play Grew Up to Be a Musical

After Shrek the Musical opened on Broadway in 2008, playwright and lyricist David Lindsay-Abaire and composer Jeanine Tesori knew they wanted to collaborate on another project. When it came to deciding what it would be, Tesori literally pulled it off the shelf.

Written in 2000, Lindsay-Abaire’s play Kimberly Akimbo was about a teenage girl with a rapid aging disease. The play premiered in 2001 at South Coast Repertory in California before an off-Broadway run in 2003 at Manhattan Theatre Club. “She said, ‘I think this one sings,’” Lindsay-Abaire told Broadway.com Managing Editor Beth Stevens on The Broadway Show.

Premiering off-Broadway in 2021 at Atlantic Theater Company ahead of its 2022 Broadway transfer, the resulting musical certainly did sing—to the tune of five Tony Awards including for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score. (These were Lindsay-Abaire's first Tony wins; Tesori previously won for her score for Fun Home.)

As Tesori explained, Lindsay-Abaire’s story of a young girl trapped in the body of a much older woman—whatever its biological implausibility—felt emotionally true. “When my grandmother was in her late eighties, she would look at the mirror and she would say, 'God, I'm so surprised I'm not 12,'” she said. “It’s about how we stay the children we were.”

It was also a story, Tesori felt, with the right, rich balance of tragedy and comedy, beauty and absurdity. “That’s what life is, so much of the time,” said Tesori.

The long process of creative development began with a complete rewrite. “One of the things that we are deeply invested in is looking at work like you didn't write it at all,” said Tesori. “We sat in this room and we started at page one—and I mean: Punctuation. Stage directions.”

For Lindsay-Abaire, revisiting and reexamining Kimberly’s story two decades later was a lot like seeing his life flash before his eyes. “Whoever I was 20 years ago, that's who wrote that play,” he said. “My concerns were whatever they were at the time; I connected more with the teenage characters. And now, all these years later, I'm a dad with two boys and I have a different relationship with child and parent stuff. To reinvestigate it from this new place is a pretty major thing.”

Ultimately, Kimberly Akimbo the musical feels like something different than Kimberly Akimbo the play. “That's just the magic of music and what Jeanine brought to it,” said Lindsay-Abaire. “It's a completely different animal—it's more dimensional and it's more emotional.”