Un Vareno Sin Ti Bad Bunny 2022 Ornament

ing how these elements add up to the stuff of a Broadway musical, enter Jeanine Tesori, who in her 25-year career has established herself as perhaps the most prodigiously talented and versatile composer writing for the stage today. With such unconventional shows as Violet; Caroline, or Change; and Fun Home, she has shown an unmatched gift for fusing far-flung musical styles into unified scores that express the unspoken thoughts of ordinary people and give melody to their hearts’ longings. “Not to be corny, but I truly think that everybody is ‘tuned,’ ” Tesori says. “Everybody has a unique way that they sound, their own cadence. Everybody is melodic in their own way. And honoring people who aren’t often seen on a musical stage—whose song isn’t often heard—is what I love to do.”
Tesori comes to Kimberly Akimbo as an expert in collaborating with playwrights taking their first stab as lyricists. Before doing it with Tony Kushner and Lisa Kron, she paired up with Lindsay-Abaire on the charming score for Shrek the Musical in 2008. (“Jeanine understands how stories are built, and how characters work in a story in a way that not a lot of composers do,” Lindsay-Abaire says.) But Shrek was an arranged marriage, and they were adapting a well-known, hugely profitable film, with all the kibitzing, risk-averse Broadway producers and Hollywood executives that tend to hover over such enterprises.
When it came time to choose a project of their own, Tesori suggested adapting Kimberly Akimbo, in part because of its raucous and tender humanity (“When good people don’t have the tools to handle what life throws at them, it’s very fucking funny and very fucking heartbreaking,” she says), but mostly because she saw how adding songs could serve to expand the material. “I thought, Oh, wait, there’s more to be explored here,” Tesori recalls. “I really loved how David said that, when you’re a teen, everything feels like life and death. I remember, in the seventh grade, someone passing a note, and I came home and I said to my mother, ‘I want to die. I’m not going back to school ever.’ And so here’s this girl, for whom it doesn’t just feel like life and death—it is life and death. And right there—that’s where the music can do so much work.”
The hallmarks of Tesori’s music are stylistic eclecticism and a gift for sublimating her virtuosity in service of character, story, and emotion. In Kimberly Akimbo, she combines bristling pop-rock ballads and jazzy show­stoppers with quieter, sweetly wistful melodies that open up its young heroine’s inner life, usually accompanied by the plinky strum of a ukulele. “Jeanine was able to translate the subtext into a musical language that feels exactly right,” Lindsay-Abaire says. “That uke is the spirit of Kimberly.”
In the show’s ori