Two productions arrived on New York stages this week that ask the same question from opposite directions: what happens when you stop taking your time on earth for granted? One is a folk musical about a man who ages in reverse. The other is a comedy about a man who is so afraid of dying that he has forgotten how to live.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Public Theater (Newman Theater) · Opened October 21 · Through December 6
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button began in 2019 at London's Southwark Playhouse, a fringe venue with fewer than 300 seats. By 2024, it had transferred to the West End's Ambassadors Theatre. In April 2025, it won three Olivier Awards — Best New Musical, Best Actor in a Musical for John Dagleish, and Outstanding Musical Contribution — making it the most decorated new British musical of the year. Now it has crossed the Atlantic for its North American premiere at The Public Theater, with a new cast led by Tony nominee Andrew Durand.
The show takes F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 short story and moves it from Baltimore to a fishing village on the north coast of Cornwall. Under the light of a full moon, something most curious occurs: Benjamin Button is born as an elderly man, and from that night forward, he ages in reverse. He falls in love with a barmaid named Elowen Keene. He goes to war. He raises a family. And all of it happens while time moves in the wrong direction for him alone.
What makes the production unusual in form is that its cast of 15 are all actor-musicians. There is no orchestra in a pit. Every note of the folk-inflected score — sea shanties, ballads, choral harmonies — comes from the performers on stage. The Time Out London review described walls of song that surge and crash like waves off the Cornish coast. The effect, by all accounts, is that the music feels inseparable from the storytelling, handmade and immediate.
Jethro Compton wrote the book and lyrics, Darren Clark composed the music, and Compton also directs and designed the set. The creative team that built the show from its fringe origins has reassembled for the American production, with choreographer Chi-San Howard returning as well.
The London critical response was remarkably strong. The Telegraph awarded five stars. The Guardian called it a warm and winsome musical that tugs at the heartstrings. The Financial Times found it wildly improbable yet thoroughly enchanting. The Evening Standard advised audiences to forget the Brad Pitt film — this, they said, is the version to treasure. WhatsOnStage described the entire audience being pulled out of their seats on the final note, openly weeping but cheering with joy, and asked whether this might be the most emotionally devastating British musical since Blood Brothers.
That combination — tears and joy together — is worth pausing on, because it gets at what the show is actually doing. The premise sounds like it should be melancholy. A man living backwards, watching everyone around him age in the opposite direction. But what London audiences responded to was not sadness. Clare Foster, who originated the role of Elowen in the West End, said she hoped audiences would feel they had experienced something that sits with them for a long time. The show's own description calls it a story that reminds us to make every second count. The emotional experience, based on a year of audience response, is closer to a celebration of every stage of life — compressed and vivid precisely because time is not behaving the way it should.
Durand is a fitting choice to lead the American company. He earned his Tony nomination last season for Dead Outlaw, a musical in which he played a real-life drifter who was shot dead in 1911 — a performance that required him to be a kinetic force in the first half and then stand absolutely motionless as a corpse for 40 minutes in the second. His director on that production described him as a performer who, given any prompt, brings back ten times more than you asked for. Before Broadway, Durand spent years with the Kneehigh Theatre Company, a Cornwall-based ensemble known for exactly the kind of physical, musical, collaborative storytelling that Benjamin Button demands. The fit between performer and material is unusually precise.
The Public Theater's Newman Theater holds roughly 600 seats — intimate enough that the actor-musician form should land with force. The production, originally scheduled through November 15, has already extended its run through December 6 — a sign of strong early demand. The show has demonstrated, across five years and three productions of increasing scale, that it can move an audience. Whether this American cast, in this house, can replicate what London built is the open question. The pedigree — and the extension — suggest they can.
The Imaginary Invalid
Todd Haimes Theatre (Broadway) · Opened October 22 · Through November 22
Bill Irwin is 76 years old, a Tony winner, a MacArthur fellow, and one of the last practitioners of a clowning tradition that traces back through the great European physical comedians. He is also the adapter and star of Roundabout Theatre Company's new Broadway production of Molière's final play. Reviews arrived last night, and they are genuinely divided — but the division itself reveals something interesting about what Irwin is doing with 350-year-old material.
The Imaginary Invalid centers on Argan, a wealthy man so consumed by health anxiety that he has organized his entire household around his ailments. He plans to marry his daughter Angélique to a young doctor to guarantee free medical care. His second wife Béline is quietly scheming for his money. And his maid Toinette — played by Rachel Bloom, making her Broadway debut — is the sharpest person in the room.
Irwin's adaptation runs a brisk 90 minutes and, according to the 1 Minute Critic's four-star review, it feels urgently tailored to our modern obsession with wellness. The review positions Argan not as a 17th-century caricature but as the ultimate modern consumer caught in a predatory self-care trap — a man who has surrendered his wealth to practitioners who commodify his fear. In a culture of algorithmic health optimization, premium supplements, and medical anxiety around exorbitant healthcare costs, the observation lands.
The New York Times called the production sparkling, a cure for what ails you. The Wall Street Journal praised Irwin's hilarious hypochondriac. Deadline found that Irwin gets free rein to clown, noting a lovely moment that closes the show. But the New York Post was considerably less enthusiastic, and the New York Theatre Guide found the humor too broad, though it recommended the show for admirers of Irwin and Bloom.
Where the critics converge is on the cast. Brooks Ashmanskas draws particular notice for his dual turn as two different doctors, and Bloom's Broadway debut has been broadly praised. Brandon J. Dirden, making his own Broadway directorial debut after an extensive acting career that includes Jitney, Take Me Out, and Waiting for Godot, keeps the production moving at a pace that most reviewers found crisp, though at least one felt the speed prevented the characters from fully landing.
The biographical shadow behind the production is worth knowing. Molière wrote The Imaginary Invalid while genuinely ill with tuberculosis. He cast himself as Argan. During the play's fourth performance, he collapsed on stage. He died later that evening. The greatest comedy ever written about a man who only thinks he is dying was created by a man who actually was. Irwin, performing the role at 76, does not appear to be playing that irony — by most accounts he is playing the comedy — but the fact sits under the material whether the production acknowledges it or not.
The run closes November 22 — 31 days from tonight. This is a Roundabout subscription production at the Todd Haimes Theatre, and the closing date is fixed. There will be no extension.
© 2026 Classicalite All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
