Jeanine Tesori is thinking about her mother back home in the US. But she would look in the mirror and be like, ‘I can’t believe I’m old.’ It’s always a surprise, always. There’s an interiority about ageing, especially as women.
You stay playful and you stay curious, but the world has other ideas.” Ageing – and growing up, which is not necessarily the same thing – are a central consideration in the musical that Tesori has been rehearsing. Kimberly Akimbo, which the composer developed with David Lindsay-Abaire from his play, follows a teenage girl with a rare genetic condition that causes her to age at four times the normal rate. Its London debut stars the 66-year-old Maria Friedman as Kimberly.
Kimberly Akimbo is a comedy about a chaotic family (from a hypochondriac mother to a criminal aunt) and a tender teenage romance. Uplifting and achingly funny, the original New York production was the biggest winner of the 2023 Tony awards. Tesori watched the London cast rehearse its bittersweet ending with her lips zipped firmly shut: “David and I know the show so well that we have to just let people interpret it their own way.” For Tesori, a protagonist who knows she may not reach adulthood raises the question of how we use our time.
I’m from that generation of watching these incredible people, mostly men, disappear. You become aware of how you live.” At 64, her own life looks a fulfilled one: mother, teacher, legend of her industry. Her compositional dexterity and range, combined with an extraordinary ability to turn playwrights into lyricists and librettists, has produced everything from fun-packed Broadway shows (Thoroughly Modern Millie, Shrek), to complex, thought-provoking musicals (Soft Power, Caroline, or Change) and avant garde operas about police racism, drone pilots, and Eugene O’Neill’s marital rows.
A production of that last one – an adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s celebrated autobiographical graphic novel – ran at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre this summer and its director, Sarah Frankcom, calls it “a masterpiece”, adding: “Jeanine is able to express moments of profound change in people, in what is a very spare musical. The motifs coalesce and consolidate and lead you towards a last 15 minutes that are absolutely shattering.” Tesori admits she’s drawn to dad-daughter stories, which are at the heart of Fun Home, Caroline, or Change and Kimberly Akimbo. Her own father died more than 20 years ago, but “the story lives on, and I think it helps me process – you try to answer the unanswerable question.
My father was a very complicated man: a man of science who really wanted to be a fisherman. He wanted a simple life and he got anything but; he wanted sons and he got daughters.” Tesori’s upbringing in a chaotic, multi-generational Italian family helped inspire some of Kimberly Akimbo’s scenes. (Her three sisters sound a hoot: not long ago one of them stole a picnic table from a park in broad daylight to prove that older women are invisible). It also played its part in her musical development.
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