‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ review: The real mystery of this musical is why

Perhaps when you think of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, you think of Brad Pitt, who headlined David Fincher’s 2008 film adaptation to the tune of 13 Oscar nominations (though no major category wins). That movie took major liberties with the 1922 F. Scott Fitzgerald short story on which it’s based. So does the Olivier Award-winning new musical, which has just opened Off-Broadway at the Public Theater.

And that’s for the best, as Fitzgerald’s short story was mean and odd. Alas, the movie and musical made from it are less of both, and yet, I yearn for more.

What remains the same across all three iterations is this: Benjamin Button is born old and ages in reverse. Thus, his death is basically going from zygote to nothingness.

In the case of the musical, writer/lyricist Jethro Compton and composer/lyricist Darren Clark transport the story from 1860s Baltimore to a Cornish fishing village at the end of World War I. There, a quirky village consists of a baker with a wandering eye, a drunken tea shop proprietor, a woman who dreams of growing her lawn gnome into a husband (stranger things have happened), and Roger Button (Brandon J. Ellis), an expectant father who is not expecting to find his newborn son is an old man with a cap and cane.

Andrew Durand stars as Benjamin Button.

Earlier this year, Durand played Brad Majors in Broadway’s Rocky Horror Show revival. In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, he thrusts his jaw forward and stoops his shoulders to convey that the eponymous hero is effectively a septuagenarian at birth. Of course, as Benjamin ages in reverse, Durand will be tasked with shifting his physicality to that of a man in his fifties, who is besotted by a twentysomething barmaid, Elowen Keene (Kelsee Kimmel). As she grows older, he’ll grow more spry and lively, dancing and frolicking with children, then running away like one.

His performance is broad and cartoonish, framing the musical as a farce. Around him, the ensemble, who play multiple supporting characters along with instruments throughout, match this tone with relish. The music by Clark is rollicking, like a country fair. “Rag Ty Yw Tre” opens the show, setting up a theme of time and tide being fickle friends to man. Other songs will invoke nature too, like “The Western Wind,” “The Kraken’s Lullaby,” and “The Tide Is Comin’ In.”

While the musical has garnered praise since its Off-West End debut to its West End run to its current Off-Broadway run at the Public, I struggled to make sense of the fervor for it. The orchestration was loud and muddled; I struggled to make out the lyrics outside of the chorus. The voices of the company are melodic, and their playing enthusiastic, yet neither can distract that many of Clark and Compton’s songs are not just reprisals, but repetitive. “Time is a funny thing” is a sentiment repeated over and over, making the two-and-a-half-hour production feel longer and tiresome.

Benjamin Button is a bastard.

The company of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”
Credit: Joan Marcus

This is true to the Fitzgerald story too. In both, Benjamin marries a younger woman, and then flees her as she grows old and he grows young. Compton and Clark’s musical offers a different motivation than Fitzgerald’s, but their revision makes his trespass even crueler. And disturbingly, they doesn’t seem to realize how much of a cad their hero is. Or else they give him a maudlin backstory as justification.

In the short story, Benjamin’s father urges him to play with other children. In this musical, his mother and father lock him in the attic, ashamed of his bizarre existence. After years of such neglect, Benjamin takes to sneaking out on Friday nights to a pub to experience community and beer. There, he meets his future bride, though much drama will come before they wed. Then, tragedy will strike their family, and he’ll flee.

It’s not that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button doesn’t recognize that running away from your wife in a time of shared heartbreak isn’t horrid. But rather that the musical’s rush to forgive him is not just alarming but repulsive. Opposite Durand, Kimmel offers a performance that is charming and tender, while punctuated with occasional comedic bravado to keep in the musical’s overall tone. But Elowen is a character thin as tissue paper, who exists purely to satisfy Benjamin’s every need, be it love, forgiveness, reflection, or beer. Yet I felt for her as her love runs off on a vague journey of self-improvement that is a circle.

This dreadful second act lumbers into a confounding climax. Songs haphazardly tie up the loose ends of every clumsy thread of character arc, from horny baker to wannabe gnome wife. Flimsy characters flit around as Benjamin is treated as some profound figure, while his behavior is generally that of a fuckboy. By the end, I had the lyric “It’s all just a matter of time” ringing in my head, as I felt I’d wasted mine.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is now playing at the Public Theater until Dec. 20.