Arts

In a landscape of Broadway bombast, this adaption of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s children’s classic is a bewitching spectacle about love and loneliness.

Many Broadway shows come with brash boldfaces. Daniel Craig in Macbeth. Got it. Debra Messing aging until she’s 107. Oooook! Billy Crystal as Mr. Saturday Night. Ta-dah! But in the roster of April’s relentless battery of star-drenched Tony season openings, The Little Prince (Broadway Theatre, booking through August 14) has elicited shrugs and puzzlement, for here are no celebrities and no firecracker drama; rather an adaptation of the classic children’s book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, first published in 1943, using acrobatics, lighting, and dance. Children seemed rapt watching it in front of this critic, and so were adults.

This production began life in Paris three years ago, and has journeyed to Dubai and Sydney since. In a landscape of theatrical bombast, it is a bewitching, unexpected curio. Its librettist and co-director Chris Mouron narrates the story from the stage as if imparting an urgent ghost story, while actors including Lionel Zalachas (the Little Prince), Aurélien Bednarek (the Aviator), and Laurisse Sulty (the Rose) enact a strange dreamworld beside and around her.

Even after an uneven opening half (which drags and is fairly dull), and even if you are not quite sure what is going on after that, it doesn’t matter. The Little Prince is a meditative experience, a bath of colors and sounds, directed and choreographed by Anne Tournié. The show’s shifting tableaux are best experienced as a kind of fairground for the senses, no illicit substances required. It is unusual to see something on a Broadway stage that is a visual treat, without overdoing the visuals—that conveys wonder but subtly. It feels experimental, unpolished, and ambitious, all in good ways, even if the action feels a little too receded and lost on the massive stage. (There is a constantly thrumming melancholy too, as might be expected from a fable about war—as an illuminating New Yorker article about Stacy Schiff’s biography, Saint-Exupéry, made clear.)

The aviator crash-lands in a desert and meets the little prince, who asks that he draw a sheep, which is the kind of thing entitled royalty may ask you if you are thirsty, tired, and possibly injured in a desert. But this little prince has come from another planet, no bigger than a house. The planet is so small the little prince can rotate his chair and see the sunset 44 times in all directions.

The golden-haired Zalachas, in his torn yellow jumpsuit, capers and ganders this way and that around his encounters with a businessman (Adrien Picaut) too busy to see beauty, and—one of this critic’s favorite sequences—a lamplighter (Marcin Janiak), who frantically aims to light the streetlamps on the city around him, according to what becomes a baffling visual of day becoming night becoming day, and then a “ballet of the lights.” Multimedia can be an overused artistic claim, but the performances on stage work in vital conjunction with masterful use of video (Marie Jumelin), costumes (Peggy Housset), lighting (Stéphane Fritsch), and sound (Tristan Viscogliosi)

Another beautiful sequence, “the ballet of the roses,” is precisely that—performers dressed in the equivalent of green and red—as the Little Prince tries to resolve his feelings for the rose of his dreams.

This flower, the object of his love, has “tormented” the little prince with her vanity, and so he resolves to leave the place of his heartbreak, via a flock of birds, first—in this critic’s favorite detail—cleaning out two volcanoes. (One is extinct, but as he says, “One never knows!”)

The little prince’s journey takes him to other planets, and so unfolds a bigger story about power, human fallibilities and abuses. A king (Joän Bertrand) rules imperiously over all. Adults are shown to be strange, as the little prince notes, after he meets a vain man (Antony Cesar), a drunkard mired in shame (Marie Menuge), and a businessman who acquires stars and writes figures down on paper.

On earth, the little prince meets a snake (Srilata Ray) and a fox (Dylan Barone). Here he is at his loneliest, until the fox tells him that it is “only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye,” adding, “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” The humans on stage are lost to what is around them; the little prince’s challenge on his bizarre odyssey is to acknowledge everything as it is.

The Little Prince is not a love story, but rather a loneliness story. For sure, the Little Prince feels passion for the rose. But the rose, like the other things, animals, and people the Little Prince encounters are also on their own, going someplace else, traveling or existing in isolation. The Little Prince’s most affecting theme, as he travels through space and time and interplanetary species weirdness, becomes about recognizing solitude. As the pilot notes in the book, after the little prince has expressed his grief over his lost flower: “It is such a secret place, the land of tears.”

The most beautiful part of the story, and in the show, comes at the end when the pilot and prince reunite in the desert, as they try to find water; on stage this is translated into a dreamy ballet of love and companionship, and then, inevitably, separation. The show is so genuinely quirky it feels like it has ended when it hasn’t; and even when it turned out it hasn’t ended, that feels fine, because the performers have a few more tricks up their sleeves, and what on earth will they be!

In dedicating the original book, Saint-Exupéry wrote, “I ask the indulgence of the children who may read this book for dedicating it to a grown−up. I have a serious reason: he is the best friend I have in the world. I have another reason: this grown−up understands everything, even books about children. I have a third reason: he lives in France where he is hungry and cold. He needs cheering up. If all these reasons are not enough, I will dedicate the book to the child from whom this grown−up grew. All grown−ups were once children—although few of them remember it.”

In that spirit his dedication read: “To Leon Werth when he was a little boy.” The production successfully conveys this age-defying ambition too, which may explain the engrossed looks on faces of young and older at The Little Prince.