‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ Review: Good-Hearted Musical Is Long on Incident but Short on Drama
David Benedict 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.