Nick Lloyd Webber writing Little Prince Musical

As previously blogged, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 30 year old son Nick is already making an impression as a composer having written the score for the Oxford Shakespeare Company’s production of The Tempest.

But he is now really following in his father’s footsteps as an impresario having secured the rights to develop a new musical based on the French children’s book The Little Prince which was published in 1943, a year before its author the aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery died in combat in the World War Two.

The story is based on his own experience as a pilot who crash landed in the desert but it is embellished with an encounter with the Little Prince, who is boy from an asteroid recalls his adventures while travelling through the solar system with the various characters he has met on the way.

The children’s book has been translated into 180 languages and has had a number of adaptations with several musical adaptations including a 1974 film with a score by Lerner and Loewe and a children’s version staged at Hampstead Theatre in 2008.