Ann Morrison’s Great Adventure

by Avery Anderson

Ann Morrison spends her nights doing something that sounds impossible on paper: playing a 15-going-on-16 New Jersey teenager whose body is aging four and a half times too fast.

“I’m 70 and so I am a 16-year-old in a 70-year-old body,” she said. “I don’t have to act. I just show up.”

This fall, Morrison is bringing that teenager — Kimberly Levaco, the title character of the five-time Tony-winning musical Kimberly Akimbo — to Tampa Bay as the first national tour pulls into the Straz Center’s Morsani Hall Nov. 18–23.

For Morrison, who calls Sarasota home and has spent decades building work in this region, it’s less a triumphant “return” and more like bringing a beloved, weird little family member home to meet the neighbors.

Short version of the show, in her words: “Life is short, so just enjoy the ride.”

The long version? Buckle up.

“As an audience, in a time where the world is so divided and so crazy, to just sit in a place where you can stand up and leave the theater feeling good about yourself is really needed right now,” she said. “So I think it’s just about your life is short, so just enjoy the ride.”

The role that kept knocking

Morrison has been circling Kimberly Akimbo for years — long before she ever put on Kimberly’s oversized flannels.

When David Lindsay-Abaire’s original play Kimberly Akimbo started making the rounds, friends flooded her inbox.

“People were saying, ‘Hey, there’s this wonderful play out there that is written for you,’ you know, duh,” she said.

When Lindsay-Abaire and composer Jeanine Tesori turned it into a musical, the messages got louder. Once the Broadway production opened, she said, “I got nonstop texts and emails saying there’s actually someone wrote you a show.”

Casting directors agreed. The Telsey Office reached out:

“They’re very interested in you. We’ve been watching your career. Would you be interested in maybe understudying Victoria Clark on Broadway?”

She auditioned, had what she calls “a wonderful audition” — and then Broadway did what Broadway does. The show wrapped instead of extending, and the opportunity disappeared.

“I figured, well, they’re never going to ask me to do the road show because I live in Sarasota, Florida,” she said.

Then came another door.

She was about to start rehearsals for Jesus Christ Superstar at Asolo Rep — playing King Herod, “obviously, you know, obvious choice” — when the call came. The touring Kimberly at the time, Carolee Carmello, wasn’t signing her contract. Would Morrison like to take over?

“I went, oh sure, and they sent me a contract.”

That, in a nutshell, is how she runs her career.

“My whole life has been I’m not a pursuer so much,” she said. “I’ve really came to planet Earth to have a good time. And so I just go where a door opens or a window opens.”

People ask why she isn’t in New York “doing that track.” Her answer is simple:

“It doesn’t interest me to be constantly pursuing. I love to teach. I love to create. I love to write. A lot of things that I’m doing with my life would be so truncated and hard to do if I was just living in one place trying to do one Broadway show after another.”

And then she drops the line that will launch a thousand regional-theater marketing campaigns:

“Because to me, Broadway is just community theater with a lot of money. Theater is wonderful no matter where you do it, right? As long as you’re art and saying something.”

Finding her Kimberly, not a carbon copy

Morrison stepped into a machine already in motion: hit musical, established staging, creative team that had been living with the show for years. The big question: Are they hiring her, or a carbon copy?

“I was a little not nervous, but was wondering if taking over was I going to do a cookie cutter thing because some directors like that,” she said.

Director Jessica Stone answered that on day one.

“Jessica Stone said, ‘Absolutely. We want to find out who your Kimberly is,’” Morrison said.

They started rehearsal in New York during a tour layoff week.

“She said, ‘You don’t see Kimberly as a victim.’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ She said, ‘Perfect.’ I said, ‘And Annie Morrison doesn’t see life as a victim.’”

Morrison arrived prepared enough that Stone joked they’d done “two weeks of rehearsal already” in that first week. But once she left the rehearsal room, things moved fast.

She had one day of tech with the full cast, plus her sitzprobe with the orchestra — “my sits probe, you know, and my tech all at once” — then didn’t go on again until the following Tuesday.

“That was a Thursday and I didn’t go on again until the next Tuesday in front of 3,000 people still trying to figure out who Kimberly was with a new group of people,” she said. “So it’s fun. It’s still discovering how things go.”

The discovery is ongoing, especially for an actor who refuses to be a robot.

“I’m not a robot actor,” she said. “I really like to be in the moment of something. And sometimes I’ll get on stage and a line hits me in a way that I never saw it from that point of view before… just a slight little view. I went, ‘Oh, that’s so much more colorful than I thought it was.’”

Her instincts are landing. When Lindsay-Abaire and Tesori came to see her performance in Philadelphia, she braced for the worst.

“Talk about being nervous because they hadn’t seen me. I thought, ‘Oh my god, are they going to fire me?’” she said.

Instead, she got this:

“David said, ‘I’m seeing something in Kimberly I’ve never seen before,’ which is a lovely thing,” Morrison recalled. “And Janine said — I said to Janine jokingly, I think I’m your oldest Kimberly because I’m 70. And she said, ‘Yeah, but you’re also the youngest sounding.’”

From Merrily to Make-A-Wish

If you’re a musical-theater nerd, you probably met Ann Morrison as Mary Flynn in the original Broadway production of Merrily We Roll Along. She was 25, playing a character who ages backward from her 40s to her teens.

Now she’s 70, playing a teen whose body is racing toward old age.

“So the Annie Morrison who was 25 standing on a Broadway stage working with Hal Prince and Stephen Sondheim informs the Annie Morrison at 70 standing on a stage and speaking back to her as Kimberly Akimbo,” she said.

She sees a strange parallel between the two shows.

“In Merrily… we start the play as a teenager but we go into being 42 and go backwards,” she said. “And Kimberly, she’s already the spirit of a teenager but she’s already in the wisdom of a 70-year-old in many, many ways.”

Working on Merrily taught her that “the secret to youth is to learn to live backwards.” Kimberly, on the other hand, has to grapple with the fact that her peers’ cure — growing up — is her affliction.

“There’s a line that Kimberly sings in the song,” Morrison said. “She realizes that my disease is my affliction. And the teenagers, their cure is to grow, to get older, and hers is the thing that’ll cause her to die very quickly.”

The show is full of those knife-twist “aha” moments, the kind she now teaches writers and performers to look for in their own work.

“When I’m working with people writing their own shows, I say find those aha moments that the character discovers in real time in front of an audience,” she said. “Because we all do. That’s the beauty of the human condition… when does the character make that aha realization and how does that shift their course, you know? And Kimberly’s got a lot of them.”

One in particular shakes her to the core: when Kimberly realizes she can’t fix her family — and decides to leave so everyone has a chance at a better life.

“She sings a song ‘Before I Go,’” Morrison said. “It shakes me to my core, too. It’s so profound that she makes that decision and her family is silent because she’s speaking truth and they have to just witness it.”

Sarasota roots, Tampa Bay impact

For all the Sondheim lore and national-tour glam, Morrison is very clear about where her impact feels most real.

Sometimes, she admitted, she looks around and thinks, “Why am I still in Florida? What happened here?” Then she remembers.

“I’m here. I’m anchored here for a purpose. So I just enjoy it,” she said. “The Tampa Bay, the Sarasota area has got lots of arts. Even though we may be being defunded at times… it’s just temporary. Things shift constantly. If you just stay focused on what you want to do, it all shifts magically.”

Staying has allowed her to build work that likely never would have happened had she chased the Broadway hamster wheel.

“If I had gone, like I said, if I’d gone to New York to do the things that Sarasota and the Tampa Bay area allow me to explore, it would have taken longer,” she said.

She founded a theater company for performers with developmental disabilities, using musical theater as a “whole brain experience.”

“I had to learn to talk to… people with Down syndrome and persons on the autism spectrum and Williams syndrome and mental delay and cerebral palsy and all kinds of things to get them to be in the same show,” she said. “It was profound for me to explore that.”

That work became the seed for a solo play about Linda, a woman with Down syndrome who wanted to write — and star in — her own musical.

“It was hilarious. It’s so full of heart,” Morrison said. “She wanted to be Laurey in Oklahoma! And so we gave her the opportunity to do that for one performance only… then I wrote a solo play about her because she was going into Alzheimer’s.”

What Linda taught her has stayed.

“She was so profound for me,” Morrison said. “It’s when I realized that lots of times people are born as unconditional volunteers. They simply sponsor the growth of another. And that was definitely Linda for me.”

Morrison now channels that same ethos into SaraSolo Productions, the company she runs with her former husband and artistic partner, Blake Walton. They specialize in what she calls “solo voice” — everything from cabaret-style solo musicals to autobiographical monologue shows, spoken word, even stand-up.

“We’re there to help you facilitate your voice and that gives me great joy,” she said. “I love standing on stage by myself, as terrifying as it is, and allow myself to be vulnerable to share story.”

Joy as resistance, notes for the 20-somethings

Morrison talks about vulnerability the way some people talk about Pilates: necessary, ongoing, occasionally painful, but absolutely the thing keeping you upright.

Every night, she steps behind the curtain as Kimberly — alone onstage for much of the show — and has to open that door again.

“When the curtain goes up and I’m standing alone on the stage and all that time until the curtain goes down, that’s my favorite part,” she said.

She knows the show’s big message isn’t subtle. That’s the point.

“Lighten up,” she said when asked what she hopes audiences take away. “Look at your family. Look at your neighbor. Yeah, we’re flawed. Follow your passion. What is it you really want? What’s your passion? And keep going. Keep finding that passion. Find the next passion. Find the next passion.”

For younger artists chasing what she chased in her 20s, she has a note: stop fast-forwarding.

“I would say to young people to just stay in the moment of it and see what you learn from it,” she said. “I’m the kind of person who likes to sit in note sessions and listen to all the notes because I’m learning from the director how they talk to other actors… I’d like to see if they gave a note to somebody, is there something that I can do to help that note?”

She laughs at herself for getting “deep,” then doubles down.

“I would say just stay alert, stay in the moment always and not worry about what’s going to happen next because then you don’t have any fun,” she said. “I think we become different humans every 30 seconds. We go back to zero. So how much more fun is life knowing that every 30 seconds I can take another step somewhere else like that? I get to make that choice. It’s more fun that way.”

Which brings us back to that song that closes the show, “Great Adventure.”

“The show ends with a song called ‘Great Adventure.’ That’s what this show’s about,” she said. “It’s about taking a great adventure. And that’s kind of Annie Morrison. I just want the great adventure.”

If your version of a great adventure involves a Tampa Bay theater, a 70-year-old playing 16, and an audience full of people trying to remember how to be brave and soft at the same time, you know where to find her.

Kimberly Akimbo runs Nov. 18–23 at the Straz Center’s Morsani Hall.

If you go

What: Kimberly Akimbo (national tour)
Where: Straz Center for the Performing Arts – Carol Morsani Hall, downtown Tampa Straz Center
When: November 18–23, 2025