The Little Prince

A choreographer, a singer and a book

The production belongs to Anne Tournié, who directs and choreographs it, and Chris Mouron, who wrote the libretto, co-directs and performs the narration. Tournié has said she began performing at six, with parents already involved in the arts, and credits the ballet master Gilbert Canova with setting her course; the influences she names are Pina Bausch and Jiří Kylián. She also worked in the orbit of Franco Dragone, the director behind several Cirque du Soleil productions — a lineage Australian critics identified on sight when the show reached Sydney. The idea for this particular piece came from Mouron, who proposed Saint-Exupéry's 1943 novella as the story to build on. Tournié has described the result as personal, and said part of the point was to give ten international soloists from different movement traditions something to carry.

Her account of the method is specific: solo choreographic exploration first, then storyboarding with Mouron, then work with the composer Terry Truck and the video designer Marie Jumelin, then roughly two months of rehearsal with the performers. She rejects the idea that directing and choreographing are separate jobs. The structural decision that shapes everything else is that the characters never speak to one another. Dialogue is gone; what remains is movement, aerial work, projection and a narrator who stands apart from the action and delivers the adapted text.

Tournié and Mouron began adapting the book in 2018. The show opened at the Folies Bergère in Paris on 13 September 2019 and played there until 28 September, running an hour and twenty minutes and built as a sequence of tableaux — the aviator's crash in the desert, the planets and their inhabitants, the fox. Contemporary dance and aerial acrobatics did the storytelling; video mapping supplied the planets.

Dubai, Sydney and a Broadway engagement cut short

Dubai Opera followed in 2020, then Sydney. The Australian season ran at the Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House, from 26 May to 6 June 2021, with tickets from $89, and it arrived at a moment when almost nothing international was touring: the reference record of the production notes the Sydney engagement as the city's first major international production since the COVID lockdown. Reviewing on 29 May 2021, Emily Shaddick in Australian Stage praised Tournié's choreography as expressive and dynamic, singled out Lionel Zalachas as the prince with Dylan Barone as the fox, and Marcin Janiak's lamplighter swinging from street lights, and said Truck's score seemed to come out of the spaces between the words in the book. Her main complaint was that the digital projections repeatedly pulled attention away from the dancers.

New York was next and it went badly. The show took the Broadway Theatre on 53rd Street in spring 2022 with a schedule running through to August. It closed on 8 May 2022, months early, after a poor critical reception; the producers said at the time that the company would continue its international tour. Broadway was the only engagement in the show's history to end ahead of its announced run, and the production has not returned to the United States since.

What the reviews said, city by city

The Broadway notices split hard. Adam Feldman's review in Time Out New York, published on 11 April 2022, called the show confoundingly bad, described the video backgrounds as garish and sloppy-looking, called the costumes the ugliest he had seen in a Broadway show, said the dancers deserved better, and criticised the narration for delivering every character in the same register. His verdict was that the adaptation missed both the charm and the point of the book. New York Theatre Guide, the same day, landed somewhere else entirely: an enjoyable if flawed dance show, with the prince-and-rose pas de deux, a ballet of lights, the Vain Man's solo and an aerial sequence at the curtain call all worth the ticket, let down by pre-recorded music, flat projections and the underuse of Zalachas. The named company included Zalachas as the prince, Aurélien Bednarek as the aviator, Laurisse Sulty as the rose, Antony Cesar as the Vain Man and Mouron narrating.

The UK premiere came nearly three years later: the London Coliseum, 12 to 16 March 2025, eight performances, in French with English surtitles, produced by Broadway Entertainment Group, with general sale opening on 29 November 2024. Franco Milazzo gave it three stars for BroadwayWorld on 13 March 2025 and wrote that there was plenty of eye candy but little to feed the heart. He rated Truck's music and Jumelin's video, praised the lamplighter number again — Janiak still in the role — but found most of the characterisation one-dimensional and the whole thing underpowered for the West End's largest house. The cast he named included Marie Menuge as the rose, Patricio Di Stabile as the King, Edouard Goux as the Drunkard, Filippo Di Crosta as the Businessman and Lee Kok Liang as the Vain Man.

Standing in autumn 2026

The next confirmed engagement is Paris. The show plays the Casino de Paris, 16 rue de Clichy in the ninth arrondissement, from 28 December 2026 to 3 January 2027, with tickets from €25. Children under three are not admitted and the producers advise ages five and up without making it a rule. The Paris run is credited to Los Production and Broadway Entertainment Group in collaboration with the Saint-Exupéry foundation. Broadway Entertainment Group's touring page lists only London and Paris against this title, alongside its Wicked, Phantom of the Opera and Slava's Snowshow engagements.

Behind that week sits a bigger commitment. An open casting call issued by Art à Bord — the Tournié and Mouron company — with Broadway Entertainment Group sought male soloist dancers with classical and contemporary technique, auditioning at the École Nationale de Danse in Marseille on 9 April 2026 with callbacks the following day. The same notice gives rehearsals from 6 October to 8 November 2026 and tour dates from 10 November 2026 to 27 March 2027. In other words the company is being rebuilt and is on the road for roughly four and a half months, with the Casino de Paris new-year week the only publicly dated stop so far. The production's own site lists the cities played to date: Paris, New York, Sydney, Dubai, Riyadh, Lisbon, Nicosia, Lausanne, Sofia, Budapest, Prague, Tallinn, Mumbai, Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Luxembourg, Graz, Berlin, Belgrade and London.

How the thing is actually built

The design credits have stayed stable across the tour: Truck on original music, Jumelin on video design, Peggy Housset on costumes, Stéphane Fritsch on lighting, Tristan Viscogliosi on sound, Etienne Beaussart on video projection, Carmen Arbues Miro on hair and make-up, Aurélie Gandilhon on props. The score is played back rather than performed live, which several critics have held against it. The circus vocabulary runs to aerial straps, flying pole and floor acrobatics, and the planets are handled as discrete set-pieces, one inhabitant at a time.

Across seven years the critical pattern has barely moved. Reviewers tend to agree the staging is accomplished and the soloists are strong, then divide on whether the projection-heavy design carries the book's emotional weight or smothers it. The Sydney complaint in 2021 — screens competing with bodies — is essentially the London complaint in 2025. Purists who want the novella's text have consistently been the least satisfied; audiences who take it as a dance and circus piece inspired by the book have been the most.