Smartly refusing to be doggedly faithful, bookwriter and director Jethro Compton retains the arc of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (very) short, fable-like story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” but almost nothing else. Achieving an attractive life of its own on stage, the American story has been relocated to the coastal villages and tin mines of rural Cornwall with perfectly matched, lively and lovely Celtic folk music spiritedly played by a splendid cast. There is, however, a problem: the story itself.
From the outset there’s a welcome, knowing humor delivered in direct address by the full company setting up individual scenes for Benjamin (Jamie Parker), beginning with his mysterious birth at the age of 70 in 1918. His horrified parents keep him a guilty secret while Benjamin begins leading his life steadily in reverse. Having been initially hidden, forbidden to be seen in public, by the time he becomes, so to speak, a teenager, he has found a regular secret escape route into the village where he begins mixing with people who assume him to be as elderly as he looks.
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Permanently hiding the conundrum of his unique life, Benjamin suffers. Almost every situation in which he finds himself across the show’s 22 scenes means he is at odds with those around him because of the secret he is forced to keep. That gives a nicely restrained, increasingly open-hearted Parker plenty to play with as he ages down beautifully. His voice gradually loses its aging to release his richly expressive tenor in love songs with his true love Elowen, hauntingly sung by a wonderfully grounded and quick-witted Molly Osborne. And he makes the most of touching scenes with a new-found friend Jack (a sure and steady Jack Quarton).
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But by halfway through the long first act, the difficulties are showing. Benjamin’s situation is repetitive and predictable. The well-meshed creative team build expressive details into each scene but the inevitability of the story robs it of dramatic drive. Much as in Bernstein’s very different yet similarly problematic “Candide,” there’s a worrying lack of tension. Instead of being a drama in which actions have consequences that hold the audience, it becomes an unengaging “and then…” show.
Across 22 numbers (eight of which are reprises), composer Darren Clark underlines the “telling” in “storytelling”, providing narrative numbers with the company as chorus outlining place, circumstance and, most especially, all-important time in this travelling tale. Structurally that’s not a million miles away from the chorus work in Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along,” but in every other way Clark is his own man. His lushly harmonic music, strongly sung and played by multi-skilled actor-musicians, is steeped in folk tradition as reflected in his own boisterous arrangements and buoyant orchestrations encompassing everything from pennywhistle to stand-up bass via fiddles, guitars, drums, keyboards, accordion and more.
But the music is stronger on mood than momentum. At an overly long two-hour-and-45-minute run time, as everyone launches into yet another foot-stomping celebration of community, a sense of repetition sets in. And while the ballads are suitably lonesome, the lyrics — co-written with director and book writer Compton — are generic. And the moments when the company sings out the show’s themes (the difficulties of time and the importance of making the most of it) leave the audience too little to glean for themselves.
Even the beautifully crafted moments when the instruments drop out to give the 12-strong company full rein in lush, unaccompanied harmony gradually lose power. Like the scenes of the episodic story, there are just too many of them.
Compton’s production, across his own multi-purpose wooden set of planking and boxes, is fleetly staged with minimal fuss and a key death in particular is simply and effectively done. But the longer the story proceeds, the more you wish he had been far more ruthless with his own book, which is crowded with incident rather than excitement.
It’s no coincidence that the film version, garlanded with 13 Oscar nominations, only came home with three awards for the (deserving) visuals. That too reinvented the story’s internal details but still couldn’t find a way to create dramatic tension.
Compton and Clark’s entirely uncynical show, first seen in a smaller version in 2019, couldn’t ask for a better, more committed cast, and there’s a rare good-heartedness to the entire evening which, ultimately, is in a very similar vein to the other recent musical about community, “Come From Away.” But where that show had strong characters and changes of tone in a taut timeline, this lacks variety and range. A slew of producers is now attached, but for this to achieve further commercial life drastic cuts are needed. The creators have wisely been unfaithful to the letter of the original. They need to go much further.
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Jump to Comments‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ Review: Good-Hearted Musical Is Long on Incident but Short on Drama
Southwark Playhouse Theatre, London; 252 seats; £28 ($35) top. Opened, June 9 2023; reviewed, June 2. Closes July 1. Running time: 2 HOURS, 45 MIN.
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