Kimberly Akimbo

Kimberly Akimbo premiered at the Bass Concert Hall in early October. It was being help by the Texas Performing Arts Association. It was about this girl named Kimberly who had a rare disease that made her age twice as fast as her peers. Throughout the show, she goes on different adventures and makes new friends along the way as she adjusts to her new town in New Jersey. The whole show was about living life and every day like it is your last day here.

Throughout the show, the character Kimberly, changes her movement and the way she walks around. In the beginning, she is shown to have great mobility and is able to walk more straight forward. However, towards the end of the show, she is shown to have slower movements. She is shown having a harder time to walk. Her duration and speed changes. For example, in Act 1, she skates at the roller skating rink a lot. She had a birthday party there. In Act 2, she doesn’t go back to the skating rink to skate as the character's mobility is more rendered and slower than in the beginning.

There wasn’t much stage combat in the show however, throughout the show, there were four classmates of Kimberly’s that showed up in various scenes even in the ones where they were not at school. They acted like the narrators and the chorus of the show. They built the world around the main characters. They made it look like there were more people in the show but in reality, there were only nine people in the cast. They told the story and conveyed the emotion in the scene through dance and backup vocals during the show.

In conclusion, this show was very clever in the way they portrayed Kimberly and her friends and family. I liked that illusion that the four members of the chorus did by making it look like there were more people on stage. The actor who played Kimberly, changed her physicality by playing with duration and time as she changed throughout the show. This show definitely used all of the aspects of viewpoints and the changing of movement in a different way than I’ve seen in any other musical.