THE LITTLE PRINCE
The most touching moment in this touching account comes when Saint-Exupery discovers in the sand the tracks of a desert fox. He follows the trail, and though he never actually sees the animal, he imagines it: licking dew from rocks, meeting a companion, plucking snails from a dry twig. “I’m done for,” he says at last at the fox’s den, “but somehow that doesn’t prevent me from taking an interest in your mood.”
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David Zucker’s adaptation is devotedly faithful to the book. It keeps most of the language and incident, and virtually all of the feel of Saint-Exupery’s prose. But a stage production inevitably gets the prince out of the aviator’s head, and that turns out to make a world of difference. Read The Little Prince aloud to your children, and the prince is a lecture to them. Take them to see it, and he’s their representative in a joint adult-child task force to work out the mysteries of existence. You realize that the story doesn’t fall between generations–it’s a meeting ground for a diverse constituency, which is a very different thing.
There’s something maternal about her delivery, too, and that’s a terrific choice for the show. The book tends to emphasize the prince’s role as a younger version of the aviator. With a woman as the aviator, we see the level of the story that’s about parents and children. Strangely, that seems to strip away the tale’s sentimentality while deepening its emotion. Certainly a male aviator can handle lines like, “What moves me so deeply, about this little prince who is sleeping here, is his loyalty to a flower.” But Moonahan, in her leather helmet and breeches and long white scarf–well, she gets more out of it than I for one ever saw on the printed page.
