[ssba]
The Little Prince
Reviewed by Bill Raden
The Half-Shadow Players at Son of Semele Theatre
Through Jan. 30.
It’s very probable that humankind can be divided into two groups: Those who are enchanted by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s whimsical, illustrated children’s fable about finding life’s meaning in the world of the imagination, and those who are simply embarrassed by The Little Prince’s very French strain of sentimental romantic surrealism.
The former have included Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who adapted it into a disastrous, 1974 filmed musical directed by Stanley Donen, as well as British composer Rachel Portman and librettist Nicholas Wright, who turned it into 2003’s The Little Prince: A Magical Opera. A French-produced, all-star animated feature version by Mark Osborne is due out this fall.
To that list now comes director Lizzy Ferdinandi and her faithful if somewhat under-thought dance-theater adaptation that is being presented by her start-up devised-stage company, The Half-Shadow Players, as part of Son of Semele’s Company Creation Festival 2015.
The 1943 book, which was famously inspired by Saint-Exupéry’s real-life, 1935 air crash in the Sahara Desert during a Paris-to-Saigon air race, tells the tale of a stranded aviator (played here by David Anis), slowly dying of thirst, who meets an otherworldly, childlike prince (Kathryn Brascia) on a mysterious quest. The bulk of the story concerns the prince’s adventures among the eccentric and narrow-minded adult inhabitants he meets on different asteroids, and the various creatures — plant, animal and mineral — he encounters on coming to Earth.
If there is a genius to the book, it is in the concrete simplicity of both the language and the illustrations with which Saint-Exupéry vividly constructs his different worlds. Conversely, if there is an overall weakness to Ferdinandi’s production, it is the amorphousness and complexity of the show’s acrobatic movement that too often attempts to dazzle with spectacle rather than simply render the emotional delicacy of the book’s tone.
For example, where Saint-Exupéry austerely states, “I had an accident with my plane in the Desert of Sahara six years ago. Something was broken in my engine,” Ferdinandi delivers extended choreography, replete with sound effects and a human-pyramid airplane, as if she were staging the opening sequence from The Flight of the Phoenix. Instead of surprise, the effect is at once overwrought and overly familiar.
Acting-wise, the heavy lifting falls to Anis and Brascia, whose characters have traditionally been read as older and younger versions of the same person (i.e., Saint-Exupéry). Regrettably, very little of that sense comes across in their curiously subdued performances (or in designer Gregory Cesena’s mostly minimalist costuming), which are often overwhelmed by the volume and vocal-heavy mix of Benji Kaufman’s sound design. Ebony Randall contributes a memorable turn as the coquettish rose whose capriciousness first sends the prince on his journey, and Chelsea Brynd is a standout as the fox that eventually supplies the prince with the object of his journey. Cesena, Israel Powe, Priscilla Recendez and Jocelyn Sanchez provide capable support as the corps de ballet.
There is an idea in dance theater that movement is more than merely illustrative — that its physical vocabulary takes narrative to emotional or critical registers unattainable by the spoken word alone. With Half-Shadow’s The Little Prince, the feeling is more that the two are in direct competition. What ends up getting muddled is Saint-Exupéry’s delightfully ironic tension between adult worldliness and childish innocence, which is also the story’s heart.
The Half-Shadow Players at Son of Semele Theater, 3301 Beverly Blvd., Westlake; Wed.-Fri., Jan. 28-30, 8 p.m.; through Jan. 30. Sonofsemele.org.
