GRAMOPHONE Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Original West End Cast Recording

I’ve followed this beautiful uplifting show from its inception at the postage stamp Southwark Playhouse to its arrival in the West End and a well deserved Olivier Award for Best New Musical. Its scale is small, its ambition huge, and its heart even bigger. Adapted from F Scott Fitzgerald’s enchanting short story and reset on the Cornish coast it chronicles the life in reverse of Benjamin Button from octogenarian baby to an end/beginning of life where memories cease to exist at all. As the song says: ‘It’s all just a matter of time’.

The key to its success is simple. Honesty. Every word, every bar of music is there for a purpose and truthful to a fault. There is an irresistible life-force about it, an urgency, an imperative, intensified by the fact that the 14-strong cast of thousands are actor/musicians whose connection with Darren Clark’s score is physical. If you are in the auditorium there is an immediacy to both songs and storytelling. You are very much a part of the narrative. Jethro Compton’s witty and incisive and poetic book draws you in, moment by moment, minute by minute, second by second. It’s all just a matter of time indeed.

‘The Western Wind’ lays out the musical’s stall – a robust, grass roots, folksiness writ large with high sophistication. ‘Kraken’s Lullaby’ and ‘The Moon and the Sea’ represent the lyrical essence of the show – gorgeously poetic both – but the sophistication and mystery of the tale are conveyed in archaic sounding close-harmony passages that haunt the imagination and take us somewhere else altogether. The uplifting vocal counterpoint at the close of ‘Where ‘Ere She Looked At Me’ is a case in point. The exhilaration of first love was rarely so potently conveyed.

‘Shippin’ Out Tomorrow’ and ‘Rollin’ Away’ are hard to listen to sitting down and ‘Home’ with its glorious reprise late in the show would gladden the most cynical heart. Then there’s ‘Time’, the most haunting of melodies, which feels like it’s the crux of the entire show.

No praise can be too high for the gifted ensemble giving their all on this exemplary cast album. Technically, atmospherically, it’s as good as they come. I know someone who has seen the show over 40 times. I get that. And now they can relive it at home. Time and time again.