The artists Àngel Llàcer and Manu Guix have just completed the ninth consecutive season of a fantastic musical based on the story of The Little Prince. More than 350,000 people have already come to the Sala Barts in Barcelona to enjoy a work that is capable of dazzling the little ones and, at the same time, thrilling the elderly. As? Well, through a very visual and puerile iconography, loaded with symbolic plot elements, which submerge the viewer in the most essential questions of life.
The original book of The Little Prince, written by the aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in 1943, continues to sell more than a million copies each year around the world. But in reality it should sell even more. The problem is that many bookstores decide to relegate this work to children’s literature shelves, as if it were a children’s thing, ignoring that most of its messages are thoughtful arrows aimed directly at adult minds. Without going any further, in the section of books dedicated to business management and leadership, a copy of The Little Prince should never be missing.
And it is that the adventure already begins with a firm defense of innovative thinking. When the narrator draws the famous snake with an elephant inside it, but everyone tells him that he has actually painted a hat, he is praising himself for knowing how to swim against the current and escape from standardizing clichés. Because good ideas always run the risk of being restricted by conservative paradigms, perfectly synthesized in the phrase of all phrases: “Don’t make things up, this has always been done like this.”
On the other hand, the Little Prince had the healthy habit of cleaning the herbs from the soil of his planet every day, with the intention of detecting possible baobab roots and cutting them in time, knowing that if these trees grew too large they could end up devouring his entire home. Another brilliant allegory about the importance of attacking problems at the moment they emerge, and doing so decisively, since procrastinating decision-making tends to hamper the proper development of any organization.
The central part of the work is the journey that the Little Prince undertakes to explore other planets, which allows him to meet characters who perfectly portray some negative stereotypes. For example, he coincides with a vain person, only pending to please others; also with an authoritarian king, so blinded by the desire for power that he ends up completely alone; or with the businessman, who accumulates a lot of wealth while losing his pleasure in small things. All of them serve to demonstrate the need to be anchored in the most basic humanist values ??(those typical of childhood) to avoid shipwreck in the absurd social contradictions.
In fact, through the conversations with the fox and the rose, the Little Prince also teaches us that time is the most important value we have and, consequently, the best gift we can give to the people we care about. It is an invitation to conceive ambition in a holistic way, not limiting it to the scope of professional success, but understanding it as the harmonious balance of all those elements that bring us closer to happiness.
As the most acclaimed song from the musical by Llàcer and Guix explains, “there I learned that what is important is invisible to the eyes, and that we all have a Little Prince inside, it’s just a matter of wanting to hear it.”
