“Here is my secret. It is very simple: you can only see well with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eyes.” – The Fox in The Little Prince

The Peterborough Theatre Guild is bringing one of the world’s most beloved stories to life when it presents Cummins and Scoullar’s The Little Prince at the Guild Hall (364 Rogers St., Peterborough) for eight performances from December 2 to 10. Tickets are available for $10 by calling the box office at 705-745-4211 or online at peterboroughtheatreguild.com.

The family holiday musical, with music by Rick Cummins and script and lyrics by John Scoullar, is adapted from the 1943 novella Le Petit Prince, written and illustrated by French writer and military aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

In Cummins and Scoullar’s adaptation, a narrator (the Aviator) begins by recalling why his six-year-old self decided to become a pilot instead of an artist after grown-ups couldn’t understand his drawings. Then he recounts how many years later, after crashing his plane in the Sahara desert, he encountered a young boy (the Little Prince) from a small asteroid known as B-612 on Earth.

After describing his home world, including his love for a vain and silly Rose growing there, the Little Prince also tells the Aviator of his visits to a number of other planets, each inhabited by a single narrow-minded grown-up — the King, the Conceited Woman, the Businessman, the Lamplighter, and the Geographer — and, after he arrives on Earth, his encounters with the Snake, the Flower, and the Fox.

While Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince is written in the style of a children’s book, it makes timeless observations about the nature of adults, innocence, self-discovery, and the meaning of love and loss. It became Saint-Exupéry’s most successful work, selling an estimated 140 million copies worldwide, which makes it one of the best-selling books in history.

Saint-Exupéry had himself crashed into the Sahara desert in 1935, when he attempted a flight to beat the airspeed record from Paris to Saigon. After four days in the desert, he and his navigator were on the verge of death when a desert tribesman rescued them. A year after Le Petit Prince was published in 1943, Saint-Exupéry disappeared over the Mediterranean while flying a reconnaissance mission for his French air squadron.

The Peterborough Theatre Guild production of Cummins and Scoullar’s The Little Prince, directed by Jacqueline Barrow, features whimsical dance numbers with a cast of one adult actor and 25 children and teens who animate the stories the Little Prince shares with the Aviator.

“I am so incredibly proud of this amazing cast that represents an entire spectrum of age and so much talent,” Barrow says. “I took on this project to find my way back to the stage, and to offer this community an opportunity for safe, accountable, youth-driven theatre where creativity, expression, and a sense of ownership is encouraged.”

The sole adult in the Peterborough Theatre Guild production is Andrew Loeb, who is making his theatrical debut as the Aviator. The young cast members in the production include Cailleach Beaton as the Little Prince, Maeve O’Neill as the Rose, Norah Von Beiberstein as the Fox and Mountain Echo, Darragh O’Connell as the King and the Lamplighter, Makynlee Sheppard as the Conceited Woman, Jude O’Neill as the Businessman, the Geographer, and the Snake, and Alice Loeb as the Desert Flower.

Other cast members include Zannah Fenlon, Skye Beaton, Winnie Theobald, Mya Anderson, Maisie Sheppard, Pippa Peckham, Jule Loeb, Eliza Leahy, and Zoe Stevenson as the Wall of Roses, the Stars, and the Trees, and the dance ensemble of Alice Loeb, Emma Marchant, Evelyn Leahy, Alaina MacDonald, Sydney Ross, Elsa Norton, and Anna McIntyre. Emma Ivanov is the understudy for the Aviator, with other members of the cast also serving as understudies for different roles.

Linda Kash is creative consultant, with Caoimhe MacQuarrie as assistant director, Ina Stenner as production manager, and Tracy Magee-Graham as stage manager (and photographer).

Other members of the creative team and crew are Zoe Dunaway and Saoirse MacQuarrie as assistant stage managers, Elaine Day as property manager and costume and wardrobe design, Joanne Anderson and Emily McKenzie as costume and wardrobe assistants, Joanne Anderson and Emily McKenzie as property assistants, Al Tye for set design, John Robinson for lighting, Abby Duncan for sound, Brooklyn Fudge for choreography, and Shelley Moody for makeup, with Elliot Loeb as artist and tech assistant. Also backstage are Tonya Bosch, Meaghan Sheppard, Tiffany Marchant, and Courtnie Trahan, with child care by Heather Speight.

“This production is about finding a sense of wonder and excitement in a world of preoccupied grown-ups, where magic and innocence is threatened, and I am so grateful to be able to present this vision to an audience,” Barrow adds.

Cummins and Scoullar’s The Little Prince runs from Friday, December 2nd to Saturday, December 10th, with performances at 7 p.m. on December 2 and 6 to 9, and 1 p.m. matinee performances on December 3 and 4 and 10.

While audience members are encouraged to wear masks at all performances, a special evening performance on Friday, December 9th will be available for those more comfortable attending a show with COVID protocols. Masking will be required for that performance and there will be limited audience capacity with spaced seating.

Cummins and Scoullar’s The Little Prince runs for around 90 minutes with one intermission.

Mindful of family budgets during the holidays, the Peterborough Theatre Guild has set the cost for each performance to only $10 per person.

Assigned seating tickets are available by calling the box office at 705-745-4211 (leave a message if the box office is not open) or online anytime at peterboroughtheatreguild.com. For December 9th tickets, email Yvonne MacDougall at pearlwildmacdougall@yahoo.com.

kawarthaNOW is proud to be a media sponsor of the Peterborough Theatre Guild’s 2022-23 season.

Peterborough screenwriter Carley Smale continues to find success writing holiday-themed movies, with her latest project A Gingerbread Christmas now streaming on Crave after premiering on Discovery+ in November.

Written by Carley with Blaine Chiappetta based on a story by Carley and Katelyn James (co-executive director of One City Peterborough where Carley used to work), A Gingerbread Christmas tells the story of aspiring architect Hazel Stanley (Tiya Sircar), who goes home to Chicago for the holidays dejected after being passed over for a job at the top New York City architecture firm where she worked as an intern.

After returning home, she discovers local contractor James Meadows (Marc Bendavid) has been helping her father Ted (Sugith Varughese) with the family bakery, which has been in decline since Hazel’s prize-winning baker mother passed away, by not only renovating but by baking as well.

To complete against the new trendy bakery across the street owned by Hazel’s once-best-friend-turned-bitter-rival Shelby (Kyana Teresa), Hezel and James pool their their talents to craft a gingerbread design for a baking contest run by Chicago’s “Cookie King” Mark Clemmons (the Food Network’s Duff Goldman) with a grand prize of $100,000. However, the duo’s competition is fierce, including from Shelby, and unforeseen complications threaten to crumble not only their brilliant design but also their budding romance.

“When I read the script, I liked the way the love story develops between Hazel and James,” says director Pat Kiely. “They are doing okay in life individually, but something really wonderful is formed when they team up. We also have a very diverse cast, and it made me very happy to direct something that will hopefully connect to many different people.”

An avid writer and movie fan as a youth described as a “rom-com connoisseur,” Carley was born and raised in Peterborough. The Crestwood Secondary School graduate moved to Toronto to attend Humber College where she studied film and media. While in college, she interned with a production company that made TV movies.

“I started writing movie treatments for various networks like the Hallmark Channel, Lifetime, and Nickelodeon,” Carley told kawarthaNOW in 2017. “Eventually a Christmas idea of mine sold and I became the director of development for all the Christmas content.”

At 24 years old, Carley’s first produced screenplay, The Christmas Parade, premiered on the Hallmark Channel with high ratings in Canada, the United States, and Europe. She also wrote and directed her first feature film in 2014 entitled Cold Season, which won Best No-Budget Feature at the 2015 Toronto Independent Film Festival. The movie went on to have international premieres in both New York City and Berlin with high praise.

In December 2015, her original story concept entitled On the 12th Day of Christmas premiered on the Hallmark Channel and was the #1 TV movie of the weekend, with 5.4 million viewers.

In 2015, Carley decided to strike out on her own and pursue writing full time. In December 2017, her screenplay for the comedy-drama Snowed-Inn Christmas premiered on Lifetime.

That was followed by Christmas Pen Pals in 2018, No Time Like Christmas (with Anita Hughes) in 2019, and both Christmas Unwrapped (as a story consultant with writer Gary Hardwick) and Let’s Meet Again on Christmas Eve in 2020.

In addition to her holiday movies, in 2020 Carley wrote the Lifetime movie His Fatal Fixation and the romantic comedy Midnight at the Magnolia.

Midnight at the Magnolia was nominated for Best TV Movie at the Canadian Screen Awards in February 2022 and spent over a month trending worldwide on the Netflix’s U.S. top-10 list. The movie is now available for streaming on Netflix in Canada.

Peterborough actor, director, and screenwriter Wyatt Lamoureux has a speaking role in an episode of the new Apple TV+ series Circuit Breakers.

A sci-fi anthology series similar to Black Mirror but for families, each half-hour episode depicts a near-future world where youth encounter futuristic technologies that lead to unpredictable consequences.

Lamoureux appears in the second episode entitled ‘Copy Cat’, which tells the story of Jesse (Nathaniel Buescher), a high-school student who wants to spend all his time practising to audition for the single available spot on his school dance team. When his rehearsals interfere with school and home responsibilities, Jesse’s parents provide him with a holographic virtual tutor that can appear as anyone from history, such as Albert Einstein.

Meanwhile, Jesse is helping his friend Cara (Kiera Laidman) with her school science project to create a robotic mannequin. When Jesse discovers his virtual tutor can also mimic his own appearance, he gets his friend to combine the virtual tutor with her robotic mannequin to create a functional duplicate of Jesse — with the idea being the “copy cat” can take Jesse’s place while he rehearses for the dance audition.

Unbeknownst to Jesse’s parents, the copy cat takes his place while his parents are entertaining Mr. and Mrs. Wallace (Lamoureux and Helly Chester) in their living room. In a two-minute scene, Mr. Wallace complains about the cost of his boat and Jesse’s copy cat begins to lecture Mr. Wallace on home budgeting, to the embarrassment of Jesse’s parents and the alarm of the surreptitiously watching Jesse.

As well as his speaking role in Apple TV+’s Circuit Breakers, Lamoureux recently made a brief appearance in the Amazon Prime series Reacher, based on the bestselling book series by Lee Child. In another upcoming role, Lamoureux plays Dean Taras in the comedy-drama feature film Older Every Day, directed by London, Ontario filmmaker Ethan Hickey, which is currently in post-production.

VIDEO: “Circuit Breakers” trailer

Early bird passes are now on sale for the 19th annual ReFrame Film Festival, running from January 26 to February 3, 2023.

An international documentary film festival focused on social and environmental justice, ReFrame is returning as a virtual festival again in 2023, although some limited in-person events are being planned — including an opening reception and film screening at Showplace Performance Centre in downtown Peterborough.

Also announced during a virtual media event on Friday (November 18), hosted by ReFrame’s creative director Amy Siegel, was a $44,600 Community Building Fund grant for the 2021-22 festival season from the Ontario Trillium Foundation, an agency of the Government of Ontario that provides time-limited grants to not-for-profit charitable organizations in Ontario.

“We have one of the best film festivals all across Ontario for a community of our size,” said Peterborough-Kawartha MPP Dave Smith when announcing the grant. “The ReFrame festival is a celebration of a lot of independent small film producers. There have been a number of films I have seen at it that have tweaked my interest and, more than anything else, it tweaks your mind to think about things and to look at it from a different perspective.”

The $44,600 grant enabled ReFrame to maintain its operational viability and present a virtual film festival during the pandemic.

“Last year you put together a compelling case for how a $44,600 grant would affect your capacity to keep people connected through film,” said Ben Currelly, a volunteer with the Ontario Trillium Foundation’s grant review team. “I understand your grant helped you bring on additional staff so that online and hybrid programming could be done, is also being used to help with rental costs, and purchase cleaning materials and N95 masks as well.”

Festival board chair Jim Hendry explained why ReFrame is again returning as a mainly virtual festival in 2023.

“There’s a definite upside to a virtual film festival,” Hendry said. “We’re very pleased that we are going to be able to offer on-demand screening of more than 50 films. ReFrame’s virtual theatre is convenient, it’s accessible, and it’s available all across Canada, and it keeps our community safe.”

“We had originally planned a combined live and virtual festival this year but for a number of reasons, including concerns that COVID is not done with us yet, we made a decision to again be primarily virtual. However, we will be hosting limited in-person events, including a special opening night screening and reception at Showplace Performance Centre on January 26th.”

Hendry added the festival will also be hosting interviews, panel discussions, Q&As, and special events, although these will also be primarily virtual.

“Our plan is to return to a full festival of live in-theatre screenings when we celebrate the 20th anniversary of ReFrame in January 2024,” Hendry said.

Festival director Kait Dueck, who took over the role from Jay Adam in October, thanked the Ontario Trillium Foundation for its support of last year’s festival.

“The ReFrame Film Festival simply would not have been been possible during the pandemic without the generous support of the Ontario Trillium Foundation,” Dueck said, before announcing the availability of discounted early bird passes for the virtual festival.

“We are releasing our popular early bird virtual festival passes today,” Dueck said, noting they make great holiday gifts. “These passes give our audiences streaming access to our entire 2023 catalogue of curated virtual films.”

The passes cost $65 per person, or $85 for a household, and are available while supplies last at reframefilmfestival.ca.

Dueck also revealed the festival’s 2023 creative design, with a playful poster by Peterborough-based artist Casandra Lee.

kawarthaNOW is proud to be an official media partner of the 2023 ReFrame Film Festival.