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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Ambassadors Theatre, West End) - ★★★★★ REVIEW
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Mickey Jo
Pear cold crab. Pear cold crab. Do you know, I very rarely do this, but I remember the material for this being so dense. Last time I wanted specifically to take notes. And considering that it was pitch black in the auditorium, look how well I stayed in the lines. Go me. Primary school calligraphy lessons. Worth it. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back. My name is Mickey Jo and I'm obsessed with all things theater. I am a theater critic here on social media and today we are going to be discussing the brand new West End musical the Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which recently opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in London. Now, officially, it had its press night back at the beginning of November, but I was sadly out of the country. However, I already had an inkling this was going to be one of the most special shows of the year. So I put this right at the top of my list of priorities when I got back right after the Wicked movie. I'm still human now. The reason I knew this was going to be so wonderful is twofold. One, I actually had a chance to see the previous incarnation of the show when it was off West End at Southwark Playhouse Elephant. But also I'd been invited to a little rehearsal preview where I could tell that they were building something really wonderful. And I hope to convey just how wonderful this show is to you today in my full review. Hello to you. If you are watching me here on YouTube, make sure to subscribe and turn on notifications. I have many more videos coming in the coming days. And hello to you as well. If you are listening on podcast platforms, make sure to follow me wherever you are hearing my voice. Now, as always, we will be discussing every aspect of this production. I will be telling you a little bit about the narrative. It might not be the Benjamin Button story you're expecting. Stay tuned. We will also be talking about the creative choices, the material and the performances, but what I would love to know is what you thought of the show as well. If you have had the chance to see either this current or any previous productions of the Curious Case of Benjamin Button the Musical, let me know what you thought of them in the comments down below. In the meantime, here is what I thought. So if when you hear the Curious Case of Benjamin Button, you think to yourself, that's the one about the guy who ages in reverse, who starts his life as an old man and then gets younger each year until he's a baby, that is in fact all you need to know. Because that is in fact the only resemblance that this show bears to any other works titled the Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Even though it shares its name with the F. Scott Fitzgerald story and any subsequent adaptations, including the film adaptation thereof, it is only inspired by the idea of a man aging in reverse and otherwise is completely different. For one thing, Fitzgerald's version takes place in America. And when Jethro Compton adapted it, he transplanted the action to his native Cornwall, to a small fishing village. His Benjamin Button is born to two members of that community who are ashamed to have brought this unusual child into the world and ban him from having any kind of contact with anyone in the village. In fact, they ban him from venturing outside. They shut him up in the attic. It's there, banned from any kind of human contact and robbed of any emotional warmth from his parents, that he stares longingly at the moon and fall, falls entirely in love with it. Now, this is all taking place between the first and Second World wars and carrying on into the decades after World War II. But it's interesting because a village such as this moves with the times to a certain extent, but is also something of a time capsule. One major exception to this being the outbreak of the Second World War, which reached just about everybody and affected Benjamin inevitably, as well as the race towards the moon, something that unsurprisingly drew Benjamin's fascination. And as mankind journeyed towards their first steps on the moon, so too did Benjamin journey unconventionally through life. Now, it's so interesting adapting something so liberally because retaining only the idea of like, what might it be like for somebody aging in reverse? There are so many interesting places where you can take this story, and that's exactly where they go to fascinating and deeply human destinations as Benjamin attempts to forge friendships and even a long lasting relationship without revealing this secret about himself. And you could characterize the central plot of this show as a love story between himself and a young an initially young local girl named Elohin. He meets her in his mid-50s when she is a young woman, but they aren't really able to commence a relationship until years afterwards because of circumstance. Circumstance being something which runs throughout the blood of this show, the narration shared by the entire company of actor, musician, performers charmingly reminds us of incidental decisions and happenings which cumulatively amount to significant consequences. Now, without giving away too many details about the narrative and utterly spoiling the plot for you, what I love is the moments that they choose to shine a light on within Benjamin's lifetime. And it's a little mathematical, but it's also hugely emotional. We see this initial meeting between himself and Aloen we see the moment where they come to get to know each other a little better. We see the moment where they overlap and where they are, for the first and only time in both of their lifetimes, the same age. We then see the sort of mirror images of this when he is as young as she once was and she is the age he was when they first met. And in fact, there are a few more details about this plot and about the material that I would love to specifically highlight, but they do veil venture into more of a spoiler territory. So if you don't want to know, skip ahead to the next section where there will be fewer spoilers. Now that we're all on the same page, let's carry on. In fact, it's beyond Elohin's lifetime that Benjamin's points of significance continue, because they have had children. And we see Benjamin, the same age as his son, finding common ground after a strain in their relationship. Because Benjamin, after the loss of their daughter at a young age, had fled his family and gone to America in pursuit of some sort of a cure, only to find there, after reaching his emotional low point, a reminder of what was really important and what really constituted his home the entire time. It's the woman he fell in love with and the children that they had together. Now, what makes this story and this character interesting is the nature of his aging in reverse. Because unlike other interpretations of the Benjamin Button story, even the original Benjamin Button story, he is born a hugely articulate and sort of profoundly wise old gentleman who is fully dressed, he's in a three piece suit, he's wearing glasses, he has a bowler hat. His birth is sort of inexplicable and scarcely explained in detail other than the suggestion that this is how he arrived. The cherry on the top of this comedy moment being the moment that he produces a pipe and asks if anyone minds if he smokes in the delivery room. But what starts as a charming notion turns into fascinating character development, because in fact, he is aging in reverse in every conceivable way, not just physically, but also mentally. And as he becomes a younger man, the more wise decisions that he has been making, the advice he has been dispensing to those around him, becomes less level headed, becomes more foolish, becomes more selfish. And we see him at his most thoughtless and reckless when he is younger, towards the end of the narrative. Beyond this, there's an epilogue discussing his descent into adolescence, when he becomes a grandfather as a teenager and then eventually becomes the same age as his own grandchild and his own father, more than 100 years old at this point, who had disowned him essentially from birth, is finally able to find some sense of peace watching his son as a small child, the thing that he always wanted, the thing that him and his wife wanted so much, and the lack of which drove her to suicide. In this way, it's the father son relationship that bookends the entire thing. And what I love about it is it teaches us so much about humanity. We see so much of life through Benjamin's unique point of view. And faced with this inherently sort of a dangerous and a frightening prospect of him aging in opposition to everyone he has ever loved, it reminds us not to take time for granted. There are a lot of pieces of theater that have labored the point around the value of family and the value of this kind of authentic, meaningful love. And that being the most important thing in someone's life. And this really delivers that point without having having to say it heavy handedly. It just shows us. Now, I want to talk about the creativity that has been poured into this show and I want to talk both about the creative choices in terms of direction and design, but also the material as well in terms of the writing. Because Jethro Compton is responsible for many of these. He is both the writer of the book cholericist as well as director and set designer. And honestly, there are multi hyphenates in the theat world and then there are polymaths. And the last time someone had so many different simultaneous creative skills, I feel like it was Leonardo da Vinci. And I'm not talking about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle on this occasion, I so often am, because every single one of these creative contributions is so glorious. I want to talk about his writing first of all, because the brilliance of it is finding humanity in every turn and really not spending too much time on the supernatural or the scientific or overly worrying about the circumstances around why Benjamin is this way. It is a thing that happens under mysterious circumstances. At the moment of his birth, water begins flowing in opposite directions and the laws of physics turn about for a split second. And there he is in the world. And thereafter it's just a reality of his life that he ages backwards after this moment. Water is something that continues to flow throughout the writing. It is something that we repeatedly make reference to. And it is a thing of wonder, of intrigue, of transportation. It carries him away at on more than one occasion. It is a malevolent force that threatens to end his life as well as those around him. It's a thing around which he grew up. It's a thing that must be crossed to get to the other side, whether that is during war, when he travels overseas, whether that is when he goes in pursuit of something for his own fulfillment in North America. It is also, and I've had the privilege of speaking to the writers about this, a source of timekeeping. It's a measure of the day and the night and how far we've come, separate from clocks, separate from calendars, harkening back to a time before either of those things, when it's simply the moon and the tide and its pull and release that indicates to us the passage of a day. As such, in this narrative, which frequently makes reference to time throughout the book and the lyrics, we have such descriptions as the tide having ebbed and flowed 6,018 times in the intervening years between two characters seeing each other. There's also a lot of really wonderful description of Benjamin's appearance as he ages in reverse. And there's one moment, moment where the lines on his face, the wrinkles are described as being like lines in the sand leveled by the tide, it being this inevitable force that can't be restrained. Time and tide, after all, as the show reminds us at its commencement, Wait for no man. And this and almost every other idiom about time factor into this script somewhere. Initially, the ensemble sing about how it's all just a matter of time. Later, when Benjamin is trying to maintain the facade of a happy, ordinary life, they remind him how the tide is coming, coming in, metaphorically speaking, we're also reminded that time heals all wounds. Truly, every idiom about time and tide factor into this show somewhere and are given beautiful meaning. Now we'll come back to Jethro's other creative contributions, but I want to talk about his collaborator, the wonderful composer Darren Clark, who is in fact composer, lyricist, orchestrator and arranger on this show, with orchestrations and arrangements also credited to Mark Aspinall, who is also the music director and co music supervisor. And Darren is someone whose scores I've been enjoying for some time. He also composed a musical called the Wicker Husband Husband, another beautiful folk musical. And folk is the musical world in which we live in here, which marries perfectly to the vibe of this piece I mentioned. It's actor, musician. You are seeing all of these instruments played on stage. A teensy bit of brass, a little bit of woodwind, but a lot of strings going on and some percussive instruments as well. There's an accordion, there is even a secreted on stage piano. And like the very Best of folk scores, which we have the joy of hearing more and more of these days in musical theater. It is both rousing and haunting. It is optimistic and joyous and romantic and melancholy when it needs to be. There is so much inherent theatricality in folk music. It's ballads, it's storytelling, it's enchantment, and it's this sort of old British magic, really, that plays very well to London audiences. And Darren also has spoken about rejecting the idea of clocks and this mechanical understanding of time and leaning into the idea. Idea of the tide and the push and pull that comes with that, really informing the musical style of the piece. As we think about that push and pull, we inherently also think about the tide's relationship to the moon. We think about fishing, we think about sailing. It's all very nautical. This is also represented in beautiful metaphor. The first true love song that Benjamin and Aloen tentatively sing towards each other as they are finding out a little bit more about each other for the first time. And they sing a song conceptualizing the love between the moon and the sea who will come together but are fated always to move apart again. Obviously, it speaks to their romantic connection and relationship, which is both, you know, wonderfully inevitable and tragically doomed. Some other notes in the material I just have to tell you about. I love every single reference to numbers, whether they are the more traditional, whether they say this happened and then this happened three minutes and 14 seconds later, which, incidentally, made me think about PI, and I'm convinced that can't be a coincidence. Or whether it's measured like the example I gave before in Ebbing and Flowing of the Tide. There's also a lyric that rhymes the words, divorce it with the word, force it. And if that is not Olivier Awards worthy, then I don't know what is. Moving on to the other creative aspects, Jethro Compton's direction is wonderful. The way he uses this ensemble, this company of players, to tell this story, this, in turn, inspiring and heartbreaking story. And every point with a sort of an optimism, occasionally a glee, but always this brave determination. The way that they watch on as every scene is unfolding with such a connection to the moment they are creating together on stage. It's a beautiful thing. And they consecrate this very real sense of community on that stage. There's not a shred of ego in that space. There can't be. It's also the kind of simple and majestic storytelling I find I am very easily entranced by. Each act begins with a billow of smoke Onto this stage that. This gorgeous stage that in turn turns into the deck of a ship, turns into the port of a fishing village, turns into a dock, turns into a pub. It's this masterpiece of wooden planks and wonky angles and netting and boys hanging from the corner, lit to look like a planetary system. Of course, we have the largest, representing the moon. I've seen this done before in Carousel at Regent's Park Open Air Theater, but it's no less beautiful here. There are also lights throughout the nets above that transform them into a night sk. And this slightly rugged, mostly fishing, little bit fairy tale aesthetic also continues down to the costume design. Anna Kelce is the costume designer as well as associate stage designer and Zoe Spurs. Lighting design is a huge component of the ability of this space to transform into all of these different locations. Issuing one more spoiler reminder for the thing I'm about to tell you. There is also something striking about the first time we actually see water on stage. For it to have been invoked as much as it's been for us to have spoken so much about the sea and about water. Everything is visually very dry until the moment that something dreadful happens and Benjamin reaches into the water to try and rescue his drowning daughter, who has fallen in unexpectedly, we see him reaching into a trapdoor on the stage and bursting out with his head dripping with water. This same water has not only torn from his family, a part of them, and caused them this extraordinary grief and devastation, but has also revealed to them the young man he is by this time time. But with further praise, I could pile onto this creative team. I would love to tell you about the performances now. Many of the company are returning to the show, having appeared in previous productions. But the two leading performers are new to this run. They are John Daglish, who portrays the character of Benjamin Button, as well as Claire Foster, who portrays Elohin. And they are both utterly remarkable. Let's talk about John first. He is. Is fascinating in the way that he convinces you, not with prosthesis, not with makeup or anything other than his own physicality, his own posture, his own facial expression, the affectation of his voice, his demeanor, his comedy, that he is, at every point throughout the show, the age he needs to be. But it's a bizarre watch because it's so, so believable. Very little changes about his appearance, but you can suspend disbelief so readily to view him as a man of 70, of 55, of 40, of mid-30s, of early 20s even. He is convincing at every single stage and never once is it a Heavy handed portrayal of age. There is in fact a moment in the second act where the ensemble take on all of these different characters within the village. Something I love about the show because we build a sense of the small community there that is most where the entire thing takes place, or the place at least, that we keep venturing back to. And so as Benjamin returns there over the course of his life, we meet these characters again later in theirs, and there's a character called Mrs. Moncrief, and she is portrayed by one particular ensemble member. And when we meet her for the second or third time, there's an additional line subsequently that points out her age. She is now 83. And so the ensemble member realizes that and adjusts their posture to play elderly in the sort of very obvious, very hunched, scrunched up face way. And it hides highlights that the work that John is doing and that Claire will go on to do is so subtle, it is so far removed from that. It's not the obvious tropes of playing age. It's remarkable. I compel you to get a ticket and go see this at the Ambassador's Theater so you can better understand what I mean. You can watch him throughout and you would just believe that he is that age. And it's the same for Claire as well. All of the careful, subtle work he does to portray his older years in the first act she goes on to do in the second. They are every bit as good as each other. And they are both given giving the most subtle, meaningful, nuanced and layered, rich depictions of these characters. They offer so little of the show in proximity on stage to the ages that they are in real life. And it matters not one bit, which in an industry that increasingly seems to concern itself with the age of performers, particularly women, I will say is a hugely refreshing thing to experience. John is so convincing as little Old man at the beginning, it seems inconceivable he will possibly get younger, but of course he does. Whereupon it is a fascinating joy to watch him him come into confidence and strength and a firmness of decision, all of which will give way to insecurity and foolishness. Like I mentioned before, what's interesting is, though he lives life on this unusual reversed trajectory, it's still not dissimilar to the way that it ought to be. As an elderly man at the beginning of his life, he still lives this sort of reclusive existence in bed, shut up in his home, experiencing loneliness. And he still goes on to see the world only when he is a much younger man. Both John and Claire have this sort of a magical quality on stage. There's something about his smile and something about her eyes that really draw us in as an audience and the spontaneity of her acting choices. Everything is so present and so in the moment, and Benjamin is constantly concerned with his past and his future and the notion of tomorrow and what that looks like for him. And it's so, so necessary for the woman he would fall in love with that she isn't whatsoever. And there is such a compelling freshness to every decision that Claire seems to make on stage. We see her aging in a more traditional sense, go from willful to weary, but her relationship with him remains as vibrant, as joyous beneath any woes that they may experience together. And it's a really beautiful thing that they build together on stage. I feel like I keep using the word beautiful, but that's what this show is, is. And their performances, like the piece itself, are just a little bit magical, but mostly incredibly human. Now they are joined by a remarkably talented company on stage. I would like to read all of their names out, if I may. They are Matthew Burns, Jonathan Charles, Una Cox, Katie Ellis, Anna Fordham, Philippa Hogg, Damen James Elliot McKenzie, Anne Marcuson, Jack Cordon and Benedict Salter, each offering key musical contributions. Each afforded their own moment to shine. Taking on different characters, different roles, some of them hugely meaningful, some of them brilliantly comic. Jack Quarten offers a deeply touching supporting performance as a young character named Jack Trenlee, who we meet later on as an older version of himself. He's sort of charmingly foolish. There's a great running gag that accompanies his character to do with his inability to properly deliver any idiom. He'll comfort Benjamin by assuring him that there are plenty more girls in the sea, and seems baffled by the suggestion that the real version of this ought to have the word fish in instead. There's also Anna Fordham, who plays the character of Lokran and is initially as a young child, subsequently as a young man. It's a confident and assured performance that carries us into the later part of this show with tremendous capability. But also, Una Cox does really wonderful work as Lowen. Benedict Salter is indispensable as Benjamin's father. It is one of those genuinely remarkably talented companies who have come together with this shared purpose of delivering this beautiful piece of storytelling. Higher praise. I could not offer the Curious Case of Benjamin Button than to tell you this might be the best new British musical that we have seen all year. I wish it tremendous success at the Olivier Awards, and I hope it becomes popular enough to sustain its commercial run until we get there. In short, please go and see the Curious Case of Benjamin Button at the Ambassadors Theater in the West End. If you are planning a trip within its current booking period. I would consider this an unmissable piece of theater, and that is everything I have to say about it. I hope you have enjoyed this review. As always, make sure to leave your own thoughts about the show in the comment section down below and let me know which review you are looking forward to hearing from me now. Next. In the meantime, I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For 10 more seconds, I'm Mickey Joe Theater. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a Stagey Day. Subscribe.