Andrew Durand and Kelsee Kimmel with the corporate of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, on the Public.
Picture: Joan Marcus
Is there an American author whose tone has been extra constantly turned on its head in adaptation than F. Scott Fitzgerald? In some way, we persist in presenting The Nice Gatsby’s allegory of nationwide delusion and fraudulent ambition as a lush, louche true-love story, and now, becoming a member of the Fitzgerald theatrical pantheon, now we have a chest-thumpingly earnest, hale, hearty, and healthful interpretation of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the writer’s 1922 quick story a few man who’s born outdated and ages backwards.
Calling Jethro Compton’s musical — he directs on a set he designed, he wrote the ebook, and he co-wrote the lyrics with the present’s composer, Darren Clark — an adaptation of its supply materials could even be a bridge too far. The 2 properties share nothing however a title and the central fantastical premise. Fitzgerald wrote 18 pages of cool, semi-comical prose a few man born to privilege in 1860s Baltimore who, amongst different exploits throughout his weird life, annihilates Yale’s soccer staff as a 50-year-old freshman on the Harvard squad, in revenge for Yale having rejected him again in 1878 when he was 18 and regarded 50. Compton, possible impressed by David Fincher’s 2008 film, strikes Benjamin Button’s beginning 12 months to 1918 (a hero’s gotta storm the seaside at Normandy) and his beginning place to a coastal village in Cornwall. On a stage that’s decked like a country outdated seaside promenade, a troupe of nautical sorts are assembled to inform us Benjamin’s story with all of the full-throttle eye-contact and sing-songy goodwill of a Ms. Rachel video. Of their arms, the story isn’t merely curious; it has a transparent ethical, or maybe even a number of, all as neat and candy as chocolate eggs in an Easter basket. Seize the day; love conquers all; there’s no place like dwelling.
To be clear, I’m definitely not objecting to creating divergent new issues from outdated materials — I’m simply intrigued by what it’s about F. Scott, so clear-eyed about selfishness and vacuousness, that appears to draw maudlin romanticization. I’m additionally, a number of days later, nonetheless reeling from the sugar excessive of Compton’s manufacturing. His Benjamin Button is so aggressively cozy it’d as effectively be a corgi in a Truthful Isle sweater consuming biscuits and watching Miss Marple. Its assemblage of broad, pleasant accents, character quirks, and cheeseball humor would match proper into The Nice British Baking Present — although the latter most likely makes extra intercourse jokes. It might be that I’m feeling a little bit focused. I like a sea shanty and a pan-Celtic accordion as a lot as the subsequent millennial who’s been mainlining The Decemberists for the final twenty years. However wrap a play in an excessive amount of homespun folksiness and the factor begins to really feel each suffocating and, regardless of all of the driving tunes and stomping choreography on this planet, suffocated. At each flip, Benjamin Button passionately implores us to verify we’re actually residing, but the stage world Compton has constructed is just too formulaic, too mechanically twee, to present us the sense of one thing actually alive.
As is so typically thus, it’s not for an absence of performer expertise. The entire firm does triple and quadruple obligation as a number of characters and as its personal band, and Andrew Durand — whose compellingly deep-set options made him a shoo-in for a corpse and now for a pensioner with the soul of a boy — commits absolutely and genially to the title position. He’s enjoyable to observe, regardless of Compton’s having written him no actual defining options or flaws. Sure, the tides rolled miraculously backwards on the evening of Benjamin Button’s beginning, and so he was born as a tidy outdated gentleman full with bowler hat (I saved pondering of Paul’s very clear grandfather). However apart from that, he’s only a candy, boring soul — undamaged by being locked in his mother and father’ attic for ten-plus years; ultimately visited by true-love-at-first-sight however unplagued by horniness, confusion, or lust; and unambitious for something a lot past pleased normalcy. “All I would like is to reside a little bit life / Really feel a little bit bit o’ freedom / See a little bit bit o’ sea,” he sings in one in all Compton’s many songs that dutifully conform to Construction for Musical Theater 101. Funnily, the determine of Quasimodo pops up throughout this quantity, a fellow outcast “confined to a tower,” however all that does is remind these of us who know which was actually the perfect Disney film of all time of a a lot better “I Need” tune.
Right here, the defining facet of Benjamin Button’s unusual existence is love — fortunate, regular, unconditional. His mom (Sachiko Mae in one in all a number of roles) throws herself off a Cornish cliff slightly than face the “monster” she in some way gave beginning to, however that wave of darkness is disbursed with comparatively shortly in a tune referred to as “The Kraken’s Lullaby” that manages to show the legendary squid-beast right into a metaphor for the present’s protagonist. It’s not a nasty tune — a lot of Clark’s work, richly orchestrated by himself and Mark Aspinall, is catchy and even stirring from close-up. Zoom out to take it as a part of the entire, although, and issues begin to soften and droop. It’s arduous to be swept up by Benjamin’s budding romance with Elowen Keene (Kelsee Kimmel) — a knows-her-own-mind barmaid on the native pub, the Pickled Crab — if you’re weathering a broadside of cutesiness within the type of an ensemble quantity referred to as “Matter of Time,” a form of Rube Goldberg machine of winking narrative contrivance. Maybe, the smiling refrain tells us, Benjamin and Elowen’s paths would possibly by no means have meaningfully crossed “if a selected chain of occasions” involving a bunch of eccentric locals “had not been set in movement.”
One other maybe: Maybe I may have forgiven “Matter of Time” if it had solely occurred as soon as in Benjamin Button. However Compton loves a callback like Ponyo loves ham. The tune will get a full-blown reprise in Act Two — similar eccentric locals, similar butterfly-effect clichés, this time with tragic outcomes that solely enhance the general cringiness. It’s this opportunity calamity that befalls Benjamin and Elowen (and the household they’ve managed to have collectively as their ages attain a crisscrossing level) that units the protagonist wandering once more. He’s already labored on a fishing boat and survived D-Day in Act One; now he takes to the ocean once more in his heartbreak. (Evaluate Fitzgerald, whose hero, getting youthful and extra virile each day, merely leaves his nagging, graying spouse, who strikes to Europe with out him.) The mini-picaresque that happens as Benjamin searches for a remedy, one thing to grant him “a standard life,” feels significantly flimsy. It’s basically a parade of accents: a stuffy upper-class physician, a nutty electrotherapist, a German psychiatrist eager to diagnose mommy points.
The reality is that Compton and Clark’s musical, which received three Olivier awards final 12 months, presents its personal curious case. It so clearly goals for enchantment and poignancy after which flattens its personal efforts with determined mugging. Mediocre jokes come again time and again and are weaker with each recurrence, zombies with limbs falling off. Compton stuffs his script with limitless references to precise models of time — “it had been eight years, 5 months, and 4 days since Benjamin had final seen Elowen”; “at exactly 17 minutes previous 8 p.m. on the seventeenth of December 1918 … a baby was born”; “the Second World Battle would final one other 300 and thirty-seven days, one hour, thirty-six minutes, and twenty-four seconds.” This isn’t a intelligent motif, it’s a sledgehammer — one which’s pretending to be an embroidery needle.
You probably have a robust abdomen for schmaltz, otherwise you’re in a position to focus your consideration on particular person bushes in its sugarplum forest, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button does certainly include moments of magnificence and delight. A hovering buoy fills with mild to turn into the moon; the solid lays into their fiddles and whistles and conjures up the pleasure of a standard pub session; Durand, caught in blue sidelight and gently swaying his raised arms, turns into a person drowning within the very sea he wished to see just a bit of. That’s easy, honest theatrical magic. If solely Benjamin Button’s creators had trusted its classes: that numerous candy wants no less than a contact of bitter, that attraction doesn’t at all times need to smile, and that extra is usually the enemy of sufficient.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is on the Public Theater via December 6.
Join the Vulture Each day
An leisure publication for the pop-culture obsessed.
Vox Media, LLC Phrases and Privateness Discover