Benjamin Button

I was very nervous about how the story of Benjamin Button would be portrayed on stage. First of all,the source material is fairly short, about thirty pages, and it was going to be stretched over two and a half hours. Also the original story was fairly mean spirited, and did not really give any reason to care about or root for the titular character. Benjamin married a much younger woman, dumped her when she started to get older to become a big football star, and was generally just not particularly nice to anyone around him. It did a good job of giving a fairly believable account of what could happen if someone began aging backwards, it felt like nothing more than that. It focused more on describing the series of events rather than telling a story

The musical greatly adapted the short story by almost completely ignoring it. It maintained the key plot and characters, but besides that much of the story is original, and I feel like that was absolutely necessary. They made Benjamin a sympathetic character and made his story a lot more compelling. They also really flushed out the character of Benjamin’s wife a lot more. In the book more than anything else she was just a story device to further demonstrate Ben’s regression, while in the play she was one of the central driving forces and felt like a real person rather than a piece of the setting. They also flushed out the story by adding multiple characters that did not exist in the book at all, which created a much more engaging and believable world.

One of the biggest plot points that was completely cut from the musical was the animosity that Benjamin’s son felt towards him, and their troubled relationship as he grew younger. While there was still some turmoil between the two in the play, it was caused by him leaving to try and cure his reverse aging and was fixed before the end of the play. I feel like cutting this section was a very good decision, as in the story it just felt like another way for the author to say how terrible everything is and how mean people are while not really adding much new to the plot.

Converting such a pessimistic and downtrodden short story into a musical was not a decision that I would expect when taking the story from page to stage, but I feel like the production pulled it off very well. Altering the setting to be based out of Cornwall gave the music a very specific folk sound which made the whole musical feel like a retelling of a generational tale rather than just a live series of events. This folk tale feeling was also aided by the mysticism added into the story, specifically in the explanation of Benjamin’s birth. While not explicitly given a reason, the musical built up some mystery and magical elements around his situation by describing how in places surrounding the birth strange things were happening with time as well.

The only thing that I believe did not carry over great from the original story to the stage performance was the repetition of specific time periods. In both the play and the story there are multiple times where they describe a length of time as a specific number of days, hours, etc. while I did not like this gimmick in the book, it was fairly easy to ignore but in the play when it took up more time and happened more often because of its extended length, it began to grow somewhat tiresome. While sometimes it had a powerful effect, by doing it so often it started to become slightly annoying. overall, despite this one minor annoyance I thought the show was truly wonderful and is definitely my number one favorite staged musical (I have only ever seen one other, so it was not a super high bar, but I still really liked it)