Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 novella The Little
Prince is a favorite among teenagers looking for yearbook quotes,
twentysomethings looking for tattoos, French students looking for
something light to translate. But you tend to forget (at least I do)
that, in the actual reading, it’s not light. It’s a distant, lonely,
sometimes impenetrable little book: pretty and darling, but heavier on
the philosophy and cool French seriousness than its reputation.
Night Flight suffers—or benefits, depending on your
tastes—from the same odd detachment. Based on
Saint-Exupéry’s 1932 novel Vol de Nuit, adapted into an
operetta by Book-It’s Myra Platt with a score by Joshua Kohl of
Degenerate Art Ensemble, Night Flight is a sad story with a
pleasing exterior and
a philosophical heaviness that keeps viewers
at arm’s length. It, like The Little Prince, is sometimes
boring.
A story of aging men in the exciting young days of aviation,
Night Flight concerns Riviere (John Patrick Lowrie, with
mustachioed bluster), the director of an international airmail
operation based in Buenos Aires. Obsessed with efficiency and
discipline, he dispatches one of his pilots, Fabien (John Bogar),
despite questionable weather conditions. Things don’t go well.
Kohl’s pleasant and playful score, terrifically rendered by a little
live band, occasionally stretches credulity, awkwardly mating dialogue
and melody. All of the singers could use a bit more power—they
have trouble filling the huge (though appropriately antique) space at
the Moore—but the technical skill is there and lovely.
Flying makes an almost-too-convenient metaphor for life’s lonesome
hurtling—distance, melancholy, exhilaration—the
vulnerability of a man in a can in the sky, subject to such immense
variables as weather and wind. It’s borderline precious. Every
successful flight is “another point scored against fate”; only
diligence and precision keep the pilots in the sky and (nearly as
importantly) the mail on time.
The aesthetics—of period costumes, of Saint-Exupéry’s
language, of the romance of early flight—are irresistible.
“Delicately they tune their instrument, exploring the magnetic sky,”
sings Fabien’s wife, earthbound while her husband hangs in the air,
lost and losing fuel. But she feels as distant from us as he is from
her—this is a metaphysical story, not a physical one. 
