Metta Theatre has announced the release of a 6 track EP of songs from their new musical The Little Prince, written and recorded entirely through lockdown, and available today through Spotify and other digital platforms..
The album has also been spun into a short film retelling Antoine De Saint Exupery’s much loved story through the medium of shadow puppetry, in association with Little Angel Theatre, available here.
A WW2 pilot has crashed in the middle of the Sahara. If she doesn’t find water soon she’ll die. But instead of water she finds a mysterious child – the Little Prince whose imaginative adventures and tales of far off planets quench a deeper thirst.
Written and directed by Metta Theatre Artistic Director P Burton-Morgan, with Candida Caldicot as Composer and Musical Director, Will Reynolds as Film-maker with Mixing and Mastering by Simon Small, Puppetry Design by Su Owens, the film and album stars Rosalind Ford as ‘The Pilot’, Josh Barnett as ‘The Prince’ and Anna-Marie Piazza as ‘The Snake/Fox/Rose’. Candida Caldicot plays keys, Clare Taylor on Violin and Maddie Cutter on cello.
Metta Theatre are an award-winning mid scale touring theatre company focusing on creating new cross-artform theatre. Founded in 2005 by writer/director P Burton-Morgan and designer William Reynolds they have collaborated with The Little Angel on several projects over the years including a shadow puppet production of Benjamin Britten’s Canticles in 2010, a puppetry adaptation and 2014 UK tour of Alice in Wonderland, with acclaimed puppeteer Mandy Travis; and a circus/puppetry musical adaptation of Rob Biddulph’s Blown Away in 2017.
P Burton-Morgan, who in 2020 won the Writers Guild of Great Britain Award for musical theatre book writing for In the Willows explains, “The eventual live production will be a full-length musical but it’s been a joy reimagining it as a short puppetry film. The tenderness of Candida’s magical score and Su’s delightful puppets, coupled with the poignancy of the original story, really speak to the profound sense of loss we’re all navigating our way through right now and how ultimately we can all find solace in the power of the imagination.”
Samantha Lane from Little Angel Theatre said, “I’m delighted that Little Angel is collaborating with Metta Theatre again. They are such an exciting and inspirational company – and it is in fantastic to share The Little Prince as part of our digital programme, Watch, Make and Share.”
Metta Theatre has been at the forefront of new work – with a strong focus on the development of new British musical theatre, and a commitment to highlighting climate justice and sustainability; disability and deaf integration and inclusion (both from a political perspective and in order to artistically enrich the work); queering mainstream and family theatre – writing characters that represent and normalise (rather than problematise) the diverse range of queer experiences and identities; re-gendering protagonists in order to give girls strong female role models.
