Theatre: Pulling Strings

Originally published in The Walrus. Read the full text here. 

The mechanics of bringing Le Petit Prince to the stage

Beautiful stage productions take shape in ugly places. Some of London’s most lavish sets are built on a grim industrial wharf; New York’s Metropolitan Opera keeps its stage pieces in a New Jersey storage yard; and the National Ballet of Canada has its headquarters at Toronto’s dreary downtown harbourfront.

Four months ago, in a studio overlooking a tangle of overpasses, National Ballet soloist Tanya Howard tried on a silk tulle gown alongside Toronto-born stage designer Michael Levine. In June, Howard will dance the part of the Rose in Le Petit Prince, an original production based on the beloved French novella by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. With her lofty cheekbones and orb-like eyes, she would look beautiful in anything, but Levine was unimpressed. “It’s very minty, the colour,” he said, frowning as he pointed to the base of the dress. He had envisioned the costume getting gradually lighter, from the dark-green hemline to the flesh-coloured bodice. In the version before him, the hem was too bright and the colour gradient too abrupt. “The legs, which are the rose stem, should turn slowly into the body of a woman,” he explained.

Levine, one of the world’s most renowned stage designers, is based in London. But his work takes him everywhere—from Broadway to the Vienna State Opera to La Scala. His constant globe-trotting meant that he had to submit some of his costume and set sketches for Le Petit Prince electronically, leaving on-the-ground staff to interpret them. Over the past year, he showed up in Toronto for whirlwind consultations during which he was often obliged to explain exactly how the pieces fell short of his vision. “It’s terrible,” he says. “I give people these impossible tasks, then I get back on a plane for Europe.”

Short and every bit as svelte as the dancers he works with, Levine speaks softly, with a hard-to-place transatlantic accent. He has a keen eye for detail and for female beauty—how it can be made radiant with just the right outfit. He loves all materials, from the finest satin to the tackiest polyester. He wants his costumes to be “sexy,” “sensuous,” and “weird.”

Had the National Ballet wanted a simple fairy tale—something like Cinderella or The Nutcracker—it needn’t have splurged on a celebrity designer. But Guillaume Côté, a principal dancer and the show’s creator, insisted that only Levine, with his knack for emotional complexity, could get the tone right. As a seven-year-old in Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec, Côté danced the Little Prince at the ballet studio where his parents worked. Decades later, during what he describes as his “late-twenties existentialist phase,” he reread the book and realized “it wasn’t just a children’s story after all” but something gloomier and more challenging.

In 2012, Côté and Levine committed to an all-new, feature-length production, the National Ballet’s first in more than a decade. Côté would choreograph the work; acclaimed Canadian composer and pianist Kevin Lau would do the score; and Levine would capture the darkness and whimsy at the heart of the text. Levine knew that his work couldn’t be dour, cute, or too literal; the sets couldn’t look like German expressionism, but neither could they resemble Disney on Ice. A less innovative designer, for instance, might have decked out the Rose in cartoonish petals and thorns, but Levine’s only realistic touch is the stem-like dress. Howard will convey everything else with her body: she’ll sway back and forth like a flower in the breeze and shake her head wildly, her loose hair suggesting a corona of petals.

This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.