THE STAGE INTERVIEW WITH KIMBERLY AKIMBO COMPOSER JEANINE TESORI
Posted on 26 August 2026.
Posted in: Interviews with cast and creatives
“I write to know more about the world”
Composer Jeanine Tesori’s chameleonic style has led to a string of hits on Broadway and in the West End. She told The Stage’s Matthew Hemley about her path into musicals and her writing process.
In 2021, [Jeanine Tesori] followed her run of hits with Kimberly Akimbo, a musical about a young girl who suffers from a genetic condition that causes her to age four times faster than others. The musical opened on Broadway in 2022, where it ran until early 2024, earning five Tony awards in 2023 – including best musical and best original score.
It was at that ceremony’s after-party that Tesori told me she would like to see the show run in London in a smaller venue than on Broadway, somewhere such as the Young Vic or Hampstead Theatre.
Scroll forward three years and her wish has been granted, with Kimberly Akimbo, written with regular collaborator David Lindsay-Abaire, about to open at Hampstead Theatre in north London.
“I love Hampstead and I had a great experience there with Caroline, Or Change,” she says. “David had a great experience there with his plays and I like Greg [Ripley-Duggan, chief executive] very much. And the smaller theatres are, for me, really helpful. You can feel what the audience is feeling. The bigger houses are hard when you have a new production.”
On Broadway, the musical was directed by Jessica Stone. But rather than transferring that production, the staging at Hampstead Theatre will be new, helmed by Michael Longhurst, former artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse. In fact, since it ran on Broadway, Tesori has seen only one other production of the show – a school version.
“And that’s the beauty of letting things out into the world,” she says. “We’re not supposed to be there. We’re represented by the work, but that’s where people, I feel, learn how to create and figure out their own visions for something – by trying them out and not trying to replicate what was done.”
It helps, however, that Tesori and Longhurst have worked together before – with Longhurst having directed Caroline, Or Change at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre in 2017, before its transfer to Hampstead Theatre and later to the West End.
Together, they will work out how Kimberly Akimbo – set in New Jersey – lands with a British audience and what changes, if any, might be needed. “I love London. I had
applied for a visa to live there part-time, but I teach at Yale, so I can’t do it in the next five years, because you have to spend 51% of your time there, and I just couldn’t swing the math,” she says. “But I’m not from that world. I don’t know culturally what’s happening, so how will a place like New Jersey hit? What does that mean? The themes stay the same, though. We all age, we all run out of time. That’s a given.”
Click the link below to read the full interview.
Kimberly Akimbo plays the Main Stage from 28 August to 7 November.
