At a rehearsal for Utah Opera’s “The Little Prince,” Nitai Fluchel and Jared Bybee face off in a fight that sets a theme through the whole story: adult “seriousness” versus childlike dreams.
Fluchel’s Prince and Bybee’s Pilot scowl at each other over schematics of a plane that the parched and hungry Pilot has crashed in the desert. The child Prince appears at the disaster scene, claiming to hail from a tiny asteroid and urgently begging the Pilot for a drawing of a sheep that will inhabit his fantastical world.
“Don’t bother me now! I’m working on something serious!