‘The Little Prince’ Broadway Review: Classic Tale Takes Flight

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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s elegantly humble 1943 children’s novella The Little Prince is transformed into a visually spectacular, dramatically overblown meld of dance, music, video and, best of all, breathtaking aerial acrobatics in Anne Tournié’s international staging opening on Broadway tonight at the Broadway Theatre.Staying true to the book’s plot and spirit, with only a few storyline excisions that might disappoint Saint-Exupéry die-hards (the rest of us could do with some additional trimming), The Little Prince is less a standard Broadway musical than a Cirque du Soleil-style entertainment making a New York spring and summer stopover on a tour that’s already included Paris, Sydney and Dubai.Whether Broadway is a natural fit for The Little Prince – as compared with, perhaps, a Las Vegas residency – will be determined by audiences, but the production certainly delivers on the visual panache.

Directed and choreographed by Tournié, with libretto and co-direction by Chris Mouron and original music by Terry Truck, The Little Prince plays out on stage – and in the air – against gorgeous video design (Marie Jumelin) and projections (Etienne Beaussart) that blend straightforward narrative and mind-trip fantasia.The plot will be familiar to the book’s many readers: A World War II-era aviator crash lands in the Sahara desert, where he meets a young space traveler – The Little Prince – who also finds himself stranded on Earth after visits to various other planets.

The aviator – our narrator – then shares with us the various tales that he’d been told by the Little Prince.The stage production presents each of these tales – the Prince’s doomed love affair with a Rose, his encounters, on other planets, with a king with no