Benjamin Button is born onto the West End stage with a hunch, a walking stick and venerable observations more suitable to a wizened man than a newborn.
“You’re only as old as you feel,” Button quips to his parents, who are aghast that their long-awaited baby seems to be a 70-year-old man. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
Age aside, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a folk-rock musical adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story opening Wednesday at the Ambassadors Theater in London, explores earnest and existential questions of how and where to live. The broad strokes of the story might be most familiar from David Fincher’s 2008 film of the same name, which starred a backward-aging Brad Pitt and opened in New Orleans.
But this onstage Button lives a different life altogether. He’s born in 1918 in a blustering, harbor village in Cornwall, at the southwestern tip of England, as something of a shut-away, before breaking free in search of romance and adventure. A 13-person cast of actor-musicians is onstage nearly the entire time, giving the show the feel of a fable merged with a Mumford & Sons concert.
In the show, time moves in quick jumps, but for the creators behind this fairy tale retelling, Jethro Compton and Darren Clark, the project has been a long endeavor. The show, their first to open in the West End, started life about eight years ago as a project that Compton called “Untitled Cornish Musical.”
Compton, who grew up in Cornwall, was looking for a story he could set in that part of England when he came across Benjamin Button. After an earlier collaboration fell through, Compton met Clark, a composer from New Zealand, and the pair rushed to get the musical ready for its first run 2019 at Southwark Playhouse, which was well-reviewed in the British press.
Their version is “not really a story about aging,” Compton said. “It’s a story about love and family, and a search for belonging, and a search for home.” The show has Button grappling with the isolation of his condition, and Compton said he was inspired by the style and tone of films like “Stranger Than Fiction,” “About Time,” as well as Kneehigh, a Cornish theater company known for its whimsical storytelling.
Still, successfully convincing an audience that a man is aging backward onstage was a concern, and Compton said that his team had tried several tactics over the years.
One early idea was to use different actors to play each decade of Button’s 70-year life, and in the musical’s 2019 run, they used a driftwood puppet to depict Button as an old man and another to show him as a child, while an actor played him as an adult.
Depicting a full person’s life onstage is “not an easy thing to do, and it’s not something that’s done very often,” Clark said. “You’re more likely to see it in a novel.”
Ultimately, Clark said, they decided to keep it simple. In the West End production, the actor John Dagleish plays Button at different ages, with some costume changes and a baby-shaped shawl being used for his final years. A multilevel wooden set, which stands in for a local pub, a World War II predeployment dance and a boat, also doesn’t change much.
Rather than using any tricks or special effects that might distract the audience, “we want to lean into the audience’s imagination as much as possible,” Clark said.
Other characters age normally as Button gets younger, and heavier themes of loss, grief and illness emerge in the second act. Much of the narrative centers on Button’s romance with Elowen Keene, an adventurous woman played by Clare Foster, who does not know about his condition. Button’s life is anchored by numerous significant historical moments, including World War II, when he becomes a sailor.
Another unconventional part of production is the versatility of its cast. The ensemble precisely narrates the passage of time, while also playing an array of villagers, sailors and members of Button’s family. They double as the musical’s onstage band, playing 30-odd instruments, including fiddles, guitars, drums and even a piano accordion.
Clark, who has gigged in a folk band himself, said he was inspired by an array of British folk music. But he also wanted to capture the sea shanty traditions of Cornwall in the score, he said, “to make sure that the music felt elemental and of the earth, and of the sea.”
In late October, with previews underway, the team was still fine-tuning the show — tweaking the set design here, shaving a line or two of lyrics there.
Rather than fixating on Button’s aging-in-reverse, Clark said he hoped audience members would leave the show thinking “I want to make the most of what I’ve been given, and I want to appreciate the people in my life.”
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