It is one of the rare productions in which the star remains in the shadows.
The much-hyped Middle East premiere of The Little Prince, co-written by Nick Lloyd Webber (son of legendary composer Andrew Lloyd Webber), will be narrated by his compatriot, English actor, Hugh Grant.
The production, at Emirates Place tonight and tomorrow, also features the UK’s 40-piece Heritage Orchestra, a cast of five principal singers and a chorus.
Grant’s crisp narration will link the musical passages together to tell the classic French tale of a pilot whose plane crashes in the desert, where he encounters young prince from a distant asteroid.
For a tale about based around flight, it seems fitting that the musical itself has also travelled around the world.
The original novella was published in 1941 by French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, at a time when he was in America trying to convince the US to enter the war against Nazi Germany.
But it is the quintessentially English Lloyd Webber, along with James D Reid, who has composed the music to tell the story. The stage show had its well-received world premiere last month in Canada.
"The musical almost never happened," says Webber. "Jamie and I were writing a series of children's songs together for the BBC back in 2009. He came to my house one day with The Little Prince book in his hand and suggested we write the musical. I knew the book well, as a friend had given it to me when I was nine, but I was sceptical at first. We went away for the weekend and said if we didn't come away with an idea by the end of our stay, then we wouldn't do it. By the final evening, we still hadn't come up with anything."
At the eleventh hour, Reid turned to a page of the book containing a phrase that kept coming back to him.
“It was the bit where the little prince is in a rose garden surrounded by all these lovely roses, but they aren’t his rose that he’s left behind,” says Reid.
“He realises that his rose is special. We started to repeat a phrase about the rose and it gave us a rhythm we could then start to play with.”
A workshop production of the musical was held in Belfast in 2011, but it wasn’t until two years later, when Webber and Reid had a chance meeting in London with the director of the Calgary Theatre in Canada, that they found a home for their musical.
“We’ve witnessed for ourselves now in Canada that we have succeeded,” says Reid.
"This is very much a show that adults and children are enjoying together." The Little Prince is one of the bestselling books ever published, and an English animated movie version (featuring the voices of Jeff Bridges and Rachel McAdams) was released last year.
Reid says even if audience members aren’t familiar with the tale, they will still be able to grasp the storyline through the music.
“We created different genres of music for each character,” says Webber.
“Our snake is very much an Edith Piaf-type character, and our rose has lots of Latin rhythms to it. Locations are musical characters, too, so space has a feeling of being this wide open frontier.”
Although ostensibly styled as a children's book, The Little Prince makes grown-up observations about human nature. The fox, for example, utters to the little prince: "It is the time you have lost for your rose that makes your rose so important."
“I’m still learning stuff about this book even now,” says Reid. “One of the great enduring aspects of the story is that it has this incredible mystery to it and that is something we have endeavoured to capture.”
Webber has previously composed film scores, but this is his first move into stage musical, a genre his father pretty much perfected with Cats, Phantom of the Opera and Evita.
Was he tempted to lean on his famous dad for inspiration?
“No. I mean obviously he is an inspiration because he’s my father, but let’s not forget that there’s my uncle Julian, who is a great cellist, my grandfather William who is a composer ...”
"I talk to dad all the time – I had a great chat with him yesterday about his new show, School of Rock, which is doing brilliantly in New York – but I don't use him as a teacher."
Reid says Lloyd Webber senior was probably more of an inspiration to him than to Nick, and has fond memories of watching his musicals as a child.
"I remember seeing Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and I love Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar. I think what Nick's father and Tim [Rice] were doing back in the 1970s was bucking the trend of Rodgers and Hammerstein and reinventing the musical genre.
“Nick and I also have a healthy contempt of the musical genre – we pick and choose bits we like because we want things to feel fresh and modern.”
• The Little Prince musical will be performed at Emirates Palace Auditorium tonight and tomorrow at 8pm. Tickets from Dh125 to Dh350. For more details, visit www.abudhabifestival.ae
artslife@thenational.ae
