How Bonnie Milligan Became Broadway's Secret Weapon
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Aunt Debra is a terrible person—a thief, a narcissist, a liar, and a cheat. And if she weren’t portrayed with such disarming warmth and giddy charisma by Bonnie Milligan in Broadway’s Kimberly Akimbo, you might just hate her. But instead, you find yourself happily under her spell for the better part of two hours, and can easily see why a gaggle of high schoolers decide to help her embark on a little bit of mail fraud (we warned you—a crook!).
“Deb’s a survivor, she's a fighter,” Milligan says one gray Friday afternoon from her apartment, pushing her tumble of wavy hair over one shoulder and then the other. “She's a complicated gal, she’s done a lot in life to get by and she takes care of herself.”
Indeed, Aunt Debra is the tornado that disrupts the world of Kimberly Akimbo, the story of a young woman with a rare disease that makes her body age at four-to-five times the speed of her mind. So, as the titular Kimberly reaches her sweet 16, from the outside she looks like a septuagenarian. The musical, both riotously funny and heartbreakingly poignant, portrays the ways in which the condition affects not just Kimberly, played with a deft hand by Broadway pro Victoria Clark, but all of those who come into her orbit.
“I’m certainly not the moral compass,” Milligan adds with a sly grin. “But I think the one person in the world she cares about is Kimberly. So, for me, I focus on this genuine desire to connect to her. With everyone else, it gets into a Harold Hill thing, the spinning of a web. She’s a con woman, she can read people, but for me, when I read the text, there was love there.”
That tension creates something that goes far beyond parody, a rich characterization that has captured the attention of critics. “Milligan cannonballs into the action with such old-school charisma that the show briefly seems to start orbiting around her instead of Kimberly,” Jackson McHenry wrote in Vulture, while Variety’s Naveen Kumar called her a “raging comedic force, commanding laughs with the authority and efficiency of a drill sergeant.”
For Milligan, there were small tells littered throughout playwright David Lindsay-Abaire’s script that revealed Aunt Debra’s hand: her remembering Kimberly’s birthday, asking her about a school science project, or reminding her to take her medicine—things even her parents failed to do. “When I read the play, I read love,” she says. “This is Aunt Deb doing her best to love someone.”
If this all sounds saccharine and sweet, let us assure you, it’s not. Milligan’s Debra comes crashing into the show in the middle of the first act—at one moment, quite literally—with hysterical finesse, and humor so blue it’s not often seen on the Great White Way. “My hardest part is those first 20 minutes,” she says of the high-energy introduction which includes the life-affirming, bring-the-house-down number “Better,” a risque conversation with her niece (handjobs are mentioned), and a side-splitting interaction with a mailbox (yes, the big blue kind). “That is like my marathon, it’s like going up the roller coaster, and then after that first hill, I’m like, OK, I can just stay on the ride.” That ride includes the delightful act two opener, a Peggy Lee-syle song about washing checks written especially for Milligan by the show’s composer, Jeanine Tesori.
“I remember seeing her in Head Over Heels,” Tesori says. “And she was owning something that was so compelling. Her gifts of her voice are really clear but it's also grounded in something that comes right out of the earth. It's also the comic timing … there are things you can't teach.”
She adds, “You need to be deft and surgical in this show, and everyone in the cast can turn tight corners. And Bonnie is a great actress, and a great comedian. It’s a very sensual comedy. When people say, ‘Let me slide into your DMs’ I think that’s very Bonnie.”
While Milligan is beguiling—at turns sassy and affecting—that can belie the fact that her path to Broadway has not been an easy one. “I grew up in a trailer in the Midwest with not much money,” she says plainly. “I understand not having a lot—you're just drive and desire. That's been my whole career. I didn't come to New York and step on Broadway, it took a while. So that determination and that drive is what I share with Deb.”
Milligan sang her whole life, thanks to an active presence in church (her father was a preacher) and grew up in the 90s where big-voiced women like Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, and Reba McEntire dominated the radio and served as influences. But it wasn’t until she went to college for acting, and took a voice and movement class, that she started to really understand her own instrument. While she displays powerful pipes in Kimberly, she says she never really belted until college.
Her first years in New York were not easy, trying to get auditions where she could while working temp and waitressing gigs; but her career was nearly derailed by an early bit of criticism that hit deep. “I basically had someone tell me that this wouldn’t happen for me because I’m fat,” she says. “And that really destroyed a part of my confidence I didn't even know I had.” For a while she floated by, wondering if performing would be her destiny. “I didn’t have that grit that I eventually got back,” she says. (Luckily, Milligan tells me that this person who says this is well aware of her current success.) Things turned around in 2012, when she was cast in a workshop musical (the audition for which she almost flaked on) which required some audience interaction, which led to her meeting other composers and musical directors, which led to cabaret acts, which led to more jobs. And so on.
The big break, however, came with the role of Pamela in Broadway’s 2018 Go-Go's jukebox musical Head Over Heels. “I was playing this beautiful princess, and my weight isn’t mentioned, which is the point, and every review was like how crazy it was I was cast. I was like, c’mon now, I’m a pretty girl. I’m not some monster!” And while Broadway may be seen as an accepting place, it has made Milligan something of an advocate for more open-mindness to casting when it comes to body diversity.
“I look at this season, and there's a lot more variation of sizes, I've seen people on the stages, which is a step forward,” she says. “Not enough still. There are a lot of times I have felt, in my career, that I've had to fight really hard to be seen as worthy and enough and just as talented, if not more than some people. I have to fight through their bias. If I was skinny, I don't know how long it would have taken me. And it's hard. It's difficult to fight through all of that.”
Yet another challenge was the untimely passing of Milligan’s father right around the time she landed the role of Aunt Debra, which has turned the process of rehearsing and performing Kimberly Akimbo into a bittersweet one infused with joy but also grief. “It was sometimes hard to separate Bonnie—who had just watched someone in their final days, and was in and out of hospitals, and didn’t want to let that person go—and Debra, who was watching someone who was probably at the end of their life.”
“But that loss,” she continues, “and then being in a show where I get to help a girl do what she wants to do before she goes, there’s something beautiful in that. I get to be a part of that beauty, and my dad lives on in me. He was a singer, and so he gets to be with me and be there. It’s complicated. Some days are painful, and some days are great. And I have less and less painful days, which is good, but grief never ends. It’s an ever-evolving thing.”
You Might Also Like
