When a musical is based on a known property, the powers-that-be seem to believe that adding songs is enough of a change to raise interest in a story that audiences are already familiar with. 

But Olivier Award winner The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — now at London’s Ambassadors Theatre — relocates the milieu of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original text to the English-village countryside. By setting the tale to pub songs and sea shanties, this new musical finds the parallels between Benjamin Button’s life and the sort of mythological folk fables that Brits sit around bars waxing oration about.  

---

A quadruple-threat chorus that can sing, act, dance, AND play instruments is such a cheat code, especially in terms of ginning up infectiously kinetic energy that overflows from the stage and throughout the house. 

Relatedly, Benjamin Button’s intimate band serves as yet another reminder that smaller orchestras are no excuse for the often-paltry sound design heard — or not — across New York musicals.