Sometimes a great opera will rise to overcome even the poorest production, and there are other times where a lesser opera is boosted into brilliance by a great production. Pacific Opera Victoria’s production of The Little Prince falls into the latter category: it is an absolute delight, taking a pretty, well-crafted but largely forgettable score by Rachel Portman and the sometimes wince-worthy rhymes of librettist Nicholas Wright and elevating them above the sum of their parts. It was hard not to smile from the beginning and impossible not to be moved at the end.
Frenchman Antoine de Saint-Exupéry published The Little Prince in 1943, in the midst of World War II. The slim, 80-page novella begins with the narrator remembering how, at the age of six, he was forced to abandon “a magnificent career as an artist” because the adults around him couldn’t understand that his drawing of what they thought was a hat was, in fact, an elephant inside a boa constrictor. Which is how he ended up instead as a pilot who has crash-landed his aeroplane in the vast Sahara Desert with water enough for eight days only.
But on his very first morning after the crash, a golden-haired boy happens by and asks the pilot to please draw him a sheep. Not content with the pilot’s first realistic attempts, the boy finally accepts a picture of a very small (invisible) sheep inside a crate, proving that children are much smarter than grown-ups. Over time, the pilot learns that the boy, whom he calls the little prince, comes from a very small planet, Asteroid B-612, where he spends his time raking out three tiny volcanoes and keeping three invasive baobab trees at bay. The prince left his solitary home when a beautiful, fragrant rose, the only one he has ever seen, alienated him with her self-importance. Only later does he realize “the tenderness underlying her silly pretensions … I was too young to know how to love her.”
Over the next few days, the pilot learns about the little prince’s adventures on other planets, meeting a king, a very vain man, a drunkard, a businessman and a lamplighter. Finally, on earth, the boy meets both a snake and a fox, and it is the fox who makes clear the moral of the tale: “One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”
Photo Credit: Emily Cooper Photography
Emma Parkinson as the Fox with Callum Spivack (alternating in role, not reviewed) as the Prince
But is that, in fact, a moral for children? From its publication, The Little Prince has been the subject of heated debate about whether it should be shelved in the grown-up or kid’s section, and it has spawned myriad theories from literary critics and psychoanalysts alike about what it all means. Portman and Wright, quite wisely perhaps, decided to ignore the book’s deeper complexities and build a show, first mounted in 2003, that’s tuneful and clear but also could easily fall flat through its lack of aural and literary sophistication. (Here’s one tortured rhyme: “It was an elephant the boa was digesting / I filled the rest in.”)
Director Brenna Corner ensured that did not happen. Aided by a first-rate production crew, including set designer James Rotondo and costume designer Judith Bowden, Corner fashioned a world full of life and colour but with the edges knocked off: no colour too harsh, things left just a touch unfinished, a little naïve, a little like a child would create. From that base, she delivered a piece of complete musical theatre that felt like a hug – warm and loving, reassuring even in the face of death (for yes, the little prince dies in the end; it’s the only way he can return to his rose) – while still maintaining precise control over a large cast asked to deal with a multi-level set and a variety of potentially tricky props. She knew what she wanted from them all, and they delivered.
The 23 members of the Victoria Children’s Choir were startlingly good as stars and birds while nine-year-old treble Jake Apricity Hetherington positively shone as The Little Prince, confident and charming in equal measure. Other standouts included tenor Christian Sanders as both the Snake (very slithery) and the Vain Man (how he longed to be admired), bass-baritone Giles Tomkins as a harrumphing King with no subjects, and mezzo Emma Parkinson as the Fox who allows the Prince to tame her even while knowing it will break her heart when he leaves. But it was baritone Andrew Love as the Pilot, with his warm, buttery voice and comforting stage presence, who provided the calm centre for all of the very fine cast, rounded out by Melody Courage (the Rose), Benjamin Butterfield (Lamplighter/Drunkard), Andrea Núñez (Water) and Marcus Nance (Businessman), to safely revolve around.
Giuseppe Pietraroia conducted the Victoria Symphony with delicacy and finesse, allowing quieter instruments like the celeste to have their glimmering moments, while also encouraging the music to swell into a majestic but not overpowering noise in the two grand ensemble pieces. The second, at the end of the opera, is a proper Broadway-style showstopper and sniffle-generator.
Photo Credit: Emily Cooper Photography
The company of Pacific Opera Victoria’s The Little Prince
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Robin J. Miller is a freelance classical music, opera and dance journalist, science and technology writer, instructional designer and curriculum writer based in Victoria, BC.
