It’s splendid to be sitting at the very front of the Playhouse watching a new musical from the Melbourne Theatre Company, running until 30 August, that comes with a trail of Tony wins and nominations and which has a startling plot full of familial dysfunction and horror but is directed by Mitchell Butel with a skill that you would be surprised to see equalled elsewhere. Yes, he has a magnificent group of stars – Marina Prior, Christie Whelan Browne and Casey Donovan – but in Butel’s Kimberly Akimbo the youngsters on stage rise to meet them full of elan and with a terrific verve which soars above any form of correctness.

It’s all on the face of it as mad as you could get. The time is the 1990s and the setting is suburban New Jersey. Marina Prior plays a girl with a one-in-a-million disease which means she ages by leaps and bounds so that at sixteen she looks like a woman in her early sixties. Then there’s Christie Whelan Browne who is in fact her mother and is palpably pregnant with a huge swollen stomach though the father is not Marina’s – a middle-aged drunk (Nathan O’Keefe) – but out of fear of Prior’s hereditary disease a man of a previous neighbourhood.

This central situation is performed with a dazzling panache which is added to by Casey Donovan who is a bit of a crim but who brings a tremendous lustre to the production because her acting skills are equal to the defiance and vocalic presence of the voice which stunned the nation when she won Australian Idol.

But Kimberly Akimbo is a congregation of stars in the context of a storyline that could inspire nothing but terror. Marina Prior as the girl with the acceleration disease looks every inch the woman who was Guinevere to Richard Harris’ King Arthur in Camelot forty-odd years ago and was just the other month partnering Matt Lucas in the Arena revival of Les Mis with a command of technique – that effortless technique of a born trouper – who has spent a lifetime covering the spectrum of musical theatre including a partnership with José Carreras back in the early-1990s.

Prior’s tragedy in Kimberly Akimbo is that she looks back on a life that has gone too fast with a sense of poignant feeling for all the loss that has been experienced on fast forward. She incarnates the wisdom which has been put upon her and this is superbly conveyed when she becomes emotionally involved with Seth (Darcy Wain) the boy who sees the world as a set of anagrams and who carries the stage with an effortless naturalistic charm as if the world were a magical painting box.

Christie Whelan Browne has been pretty effortlessly the standout musical comedy star of her generation from the time Simon Phillips and Geoffrey Rush discovered her for that production of The Drowsy Chaperone in 2010 but one of the striking things about her is that she has flawless verbal timing quite apart from her ability to sing and in Kimberly Akimbo she uses this in a lower key and with a sort of sweaty physically imperilled apprehension of life as a second-by-second disaster waiting to happen: and the characterisation is wholly consonant with the fact that she is now in her early forties where life is a potential disaster waiting to drop. But she sings like an angel and the interplay between this and the sense of a sort of blurting difficulty that is just kept in control – the way the maternity top can hide the imminent birth (and afterwards there can be actual nurture) is done with a stunning sense of predicament as potential doom.

But Kimberly Akimbo is full of pulsation and colour and life. It is laugh-out-loud funny through all its potential horrors. The dramatic logic of Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire’s musical is that life can be a bastard but that it is also the gift of the show that still goes on. So Casey Donovan’s Debra offers the young boy Seth a handjob but then says on second thoughts no way when she finds out he’s so young and the upshot is a wonderful Falstaffian sense of the comic perversity of life but it’s wonderful to have this sort of mordant amorality trumpeted by a dramatic presence like Casey Donovan.

And that’s true of the whole ensemble and the paradox of a disillusioned world that is brought alive by getting down and dirty with a world that is animate with the music that can be wrested from it. The songs themselves are eclectic but marvellously tailored to their occasion. It’s comically ludicrous that Prior’s father (Nathan O’Keefe) should be coming out with strictures about Seth getting into her pants but his return to the bottle is in its way as much of a betrayal as the way the high school kids do a virtually liturgical number about diseases like scurvy and fasciolosis and the choric logic is full of a sense of fun.

And that aspect of Kimberly Akimbo is a great kick against the potential misery the show is playing on. Didn’t D.H. Lawrence say tragedy should be a great kick against misery? Well, it’s a weird mutant tragicomic musical and its sense of comedy as the idiom of the theatre is wonderfully liberating. Darcy Wain as Seth gives a very starry performance which survives an extended moment of corpsing and the whole of his high school brigade turn into a wonderful bowtie and glitter dance routine. Marty Alix as Martin gives a gorgeous performance and you have the strongest sense of a very odd show where the jigsaw puzzle of human experience is turned from a nightmare of incoherence to a sparkling and satisfying picture, dynamised and delightful. Never mind that the ‘youthful’ heroine is long past menopause, that Christie Whelan Browne’s arms are marked from operations for carpal tunnel syndrome, that everybody is a potential train wreck. There’s a subtle ‘no business like show business’ emphasis that makes the show a hoot even though it gets its uproarious aspect from its celebration of the horror of the world.

The sound design by Andrew Poppleton and musical direction by Kym Purling are beautifully in sync with the action. This is a superb production from Mitchell Butel, it is a monument to the great ladies of the Australian musical theatre and its sense of the snows of yesteryear is superbly maintained.