After more than a decade apart, the team of composer Frederick Loewe and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, famous for such shows as Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, and Camelot, reunited for two final projects in the early 1970s. The stage adaptation of their 1958 movie musical Gigi, with five newly written songs, ran on Broadway from November 1973 to February 1974. But before that, they had come up with nine songs for Lerner's screenplay to a film version of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's children's story The Little Prince that finally reached movie theaters in December 1974. Like Lerner's previous film versions of his shows Paint Your Wagon (1969) and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970), The Little Prince was released into the market at a time when movie audiences were not much interested in screen musicals. And while the film's anti-war message might have been more timely if it had appeared a few years earlier at the height of the Vietnam War, it probably still would have seemed heavy-handed. As it was, The Little Prince got mediocre reviews and did mediocre business. The soundtrack remains a minor addition to the Lerner/Loewe catalog with distinct echoes of their earlier work. "I Need Air," especially in its early section, sounds like something from My Fair Lady, while "You're a Child" is strongly reminiscent of the title song fromGigi. Theater music fans, however, will find the cast a treat. Stage star Richard Kiley, in the prominent role of the aviator, is typically forceful. Donna McKechnie, appearing the year before her star-making role in the Broadway musical A Chorus Line, is winning. And famed choreographer/director Bob Fosse, making a rare appearance as a performer, is effective in "A Snake in the Grass." That song is arranged as a tango, and elsewhere Loewe returns to his usual love of Viennese operetta in waltz time, while also giving "I Never Met a Rose" a 1920s Rudy Vallée style, complete with a megaphone-filtered vocal by Kiley. Lerner engages in some typical wordplay, though he is at his most charming in the simple duet between Kiley and the six-year-old actor playing the little prince, Steven Warner, "Why Is the Desert." Such songs make this soundtrack worthwhile for aficionados, as long as they aren't expecting to discover a lost Lerner & Loewe masterpiece.
© TiVo