Monday night, we went back to the Seven Dials area to watch the Curious Case of Benjamin Button at the Ambassador’s Theater! Much like the show itself, it was a night full of emotion, music, and love.
The story originally comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story with the same title from 1922. Co-writers Jethro Compton and Darren Clark didn’t turn the story into a musical until almost a hundred years later. The framework story of both pieces is about the same: Benjamin Button is born a 70-something year old man and ages in reverse. Somewhere along the line, he meets a woman and falls in love. There is also a small time when he goes to war. He has a fairly good life especially as he reaches the typical peak age for a man at the time (around the 20s and 30s), but as his life goes on and he gets younger and younger, he slowly fades away into nothingness. However, Benjamin’s two tales also differ on multiple accounts due to form in which the story exists and how audience interacts with it.
In addition to the story’s setting, each portrayal of Benjamin Button’s life were distinct forms of media that are consumed differently. When you read, you get to create your own characters, based on whatever description is given, from their crooked knees to the way they smile. You also do all the staging, lighting, and any music within your mind. It is like creating a play that only you can see within the confines of the story in front of you. Plus, you control the timing since you can go back and reread or even skip around the story. So, while the words and the story are always the same, how you interpret it can change with time.
In contrast, a musical is different each time because of the natural human tendency to adapt and change. You cannot pause or rewind the people on stage. You cannot go back and see a certain part of the performance once it is over or stop to admire the little pockets of beauty in a musical like you can when reading a book. The story progresses whether you want it to or not, and this can cause you to miss things. In a way, that is the perfect mode for the story of Benjamin Button as told in the musical. The entire story is about enjoying your life because it is the only life you’ve got. Now replace the word “life” with “musical”. It still makes sense. A musical is temporary, so you must soak it all up in the moment.
After furiously writing down all of the thoughts that were fighting each other to get out of my brain, I decided to dedicate the next page in my little yellow flower notebook to signatures from the Benjamin Button cast!
After the show, a lot of us waited at the stage door to meet the actors. Not everyone came out, but the ones that did were happily approachable. Clare Foster (played Elowen) immediately went into caring-mother mode when she came out and saw all our tear-stained, puffy faces. Jack Quartan (played the accordion and a stranger) stayed and talked with everyone the longest and gave us a piece of advice too: “when someone pushes you, fall over.” We also lucky met the composer wh0 was kind enough to take a selfie with us before he had to run to catch his train.
– Hadley ❤
Theatre in London U of A 