Recently, Washington’s Kennedy Center presented the long-anticipated world premiere of its production Little Dancer.  A star-studded creative and performance collaboration, the show is a modern musical rooted in the grand tradition of Broadway’s heyday.

From the moment the curtain goes up and music swells from the twenty-member pit orchestra, Little Dancer captures a swirling world of gorgeous color. Sets, costumes, and music drench each scene in the feel of Belle Epoque Paris. In the decades following the Franco-Prussian War, the city vibrated with creative fervor. Everything moved, and art became a showcase for spontaneity. xxxxx

How Little Dancer magically morphed from life as a famous sculpture into an all-singing, all-dancing musical is a story in itself. Five-time Tony winner Susan Stroman, the director-choreographer, told me in an interview that the idea for the show struck her when she saw Edgar Degas’ bronze sculpture “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” at the Musee d’Orsay. Stroman was inspired by the statue’s character—the thrust of the young girl’s chin and the confidence of her stance. She instantly thought that the girl’s story could have a musical life, and she returned to New York eager to brainstorm with lyricist Lynn Ahrens and composer Stephen Flaherty, the team best-known for the smash hit Ragtime. But before Stroman could announce her great idea, Ahrens burst out, “Little Dancer”! She told NPR’s “Morning Edition” that she, too, had just seen a bronze replica of “Little Dancer”—hers was at the Clark Art Institute– and had been inspired as well.

The story they created for Little Dancer focuses on Degas’ model, Marie van Goethem, who was eleven when the artist began sculpting her in 1878. Marie was an “opera rat,” a street urchin who joined the Paris Opera Ballet as a way out of poverty. Dancing offered opportunity in an age when young women had few choices. In the Belle Epoque era, Shaw’s Pygmalion depicted Eliza Doolittle as a lowly flower girl; Alan Jay Lerner’s lyrics evoked her plight in My Fair Lady: “Look at her, a prisoner of the gutter/Condemned by every syllable she utters.”

The fictional Professor Henry Higgins ultimately offers Eliza a lifeline, but in the real-life case of Edgar Degas and Marie, the story is less sanguine.

It is true that Degas is a regular backstage presence at the Paris Opera, sketching dancers as they loosen up and rehearse. And we know that he hires Marie as a model, sculpting her between 1878 and 1881. Unsurprisingly, the young “opera rat’s” actual story is not fully recoverable; most glaringly, she disappears without a trace about 1882

Stroman told me that without knowing how Marie’s real life continued, the creative team decided to invent an older Marie who could tell the young girl’s story for her. Consequently, Little Dancer is part fact, part fiction.

Little Dancer opens with great promise. Young Marie (Tiler Peck) appears briefly in a “Prologue” before a large-scale production number—“C’est le Ballet”—sweeps us into the color and excitement of Paris in the late nineteenth century. The adult Marie (Rebecca Luker) is introduced in a flash-forward to Degas’ studio in 1917; the artist has died and his lifelong friend, the artist Mary Cassatt (Janet Dickinson), is packing up his studio. The older Marie appears at the studio, trying to persuade Cassatt that she was the “Little Dancer” model. She begs to see the sculpture, but when Cassatt stubbornly refuses, Marie unfolds her life story.

Right: Karen Ziemba (Mother), Sophia Anne Caruso

Much of Act One is taken up with scenes depicting Marie’s wretched home life– her alcoholic mother (Karen Ziemba) works as a laundress to keep life together; her older sibling is a courtesan, while her younger sister has dreams of joining the ballet. Life is harsh, and women are creatures of vulnerability.

Marie and Degas (Boyd Gaines) first meet inauspiciously. He is sketching dancers at the ballet studio when she steals his wallet; she needs money for new ballet slippers. They next meet when Marie is sent by her mother to deliver the artist’s laundry and he recognizes her as the thief who stole his wallet. Using her street smarts, she convinces him not to have her arrested, but to let her to pose for him as recompense.

In real life, Degas finishes the statue in 1881 and displays it at the Impressionist Exhibition. Instead of cheers, “Little Dancer” causes a sensation: people are accustomed to idealized statues of heroic women chiseled in marble and are aghast at Degas’ portrait of a young dancer/urchin sculpted in beeswax. The artist removes the statue from display and confines it to his closet, where it remains hidden as long as he lives.

In the musical, Degas’ scandal has immediate consequences for young Marie. Because news stories name her as the model, she is summarily fired from the Paris Opera Ballet—an institution that thinks nothing of nurturing “relationships” between its young dancers and the rich “abonnes” men who regularly fund the ballet. In real life, young Marie also disappears about this time;  although evidence doesn’t directly connect her disappearance with the statue’s scandal, this explanation works well with the story shaped for the musical.

Tiler Peck is the dynamic star of Little Dancer. An acclaimed principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, she first worked with Stroman in a 2000 revival of Music Man when she was eleven; Stroman mentored her, encouraging her to join the School of American Ballet. In this musical, Peck dances nearly non-stop. Her sparkling style and strength of movement dominate the show.

Ahrens and Flaherty’s music wonderfully carries the narrative forward, much as Rodgers & Hammerstein’s did in such classics as Carousel.  Ahrens’ lyrics and book tell Marie’s story with wit and wisdom.

But it is Stroman’s balletic choreography that drives Little Dancer. She told me that her choreography was inspired by the movements drawn by Degas in his dancer pastels. Although much of the show is driven by formal ballet, there is one scene where the “Can-Can” ricochets through the Rat Mort cafe. William Ivey Long’s spectacular costumes, which add layers of richness to the entire musical, radiate with particular razzle-dazzle in this sequence.

Layers of color emerge, too, in the remarkable projections created by Benjamin Pearcy. Working with the scenic designs of Beowulff Boritt, Pearcy is able to change a theatrical moment by instantly shifting images projected onto set flats. Theatrical highpoints occur in Act Two in the veritable mad scene of “Corridors Below the Paris Opera Ballet” and in the dream ballet, “The Little Dancer Ballet.”

In addition to Tiler Peck as the “Little Dancer,” the cast is composed of Broadway’s best. Rebecca Luker is in superb voice as the adult Marie, and Karen Ziemba—who received a Tony Award for her performance in Stroman’s 2000 Contact—owns the stage as Marie’s mother.

The role of Degas is more problematic. Instead of a figure that is as central as  Henry Higgins in telling the story of Eliza, Little Dancer’s Degas is almost a peripheral character. Boyd Gaines, who has won multiple Tony Awards, plays Degas with a detachment that reinforces his secondary significance. Would the story be sharpened by making this character more central?  Would it be helpful to have Degas’ relationship with Marie develop as he sculpts her, rather than have him perceive her as a figure almost as inert as the sculpture he is creating?

The other critical issue is the length of Act One: at almost an hour-and-a-half, it needs to be pruned.

The good news is that Act Two soars, notably in the “Corridors Below” mad scene and in the dream ballet that confirms Stroman’s place among such great Broadway choreographers as Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins.

Near right: Tiler Peck (Young Marie); far right, Edgar Degas, ‘Little Dancer at Fourteen Years’ (original, 1881 in wax), later versions bronze, fabric)

The “Finale” is nothing short of wow:  set in Degas’ studio after his death, the adult Marie has finished telling her story to Mary Cassatt, and Cassatt finally agrees to let her to see the “Little Dancer” statue. The unveiling is a moment of theatrical wonder: the statue glows. Then magically, the scene changes and Tiler Peck as young Marie becomes the statue, standing on a pedestal and gradually assuming the relaxed Fourth Position. As glass walls surround her in a museum setting, “Little Dancer” assumes her destiny as the most famous dancer of all time. Art has triumphed after all.

By Amy Henderson, Contributing Writer

Little Dancer will be at the Kennedy Center through November 30th.

http://www.kennedy-center.org/events/?event=TPTSA&promotionno=182814

The National Gallery of Art has a collateral exhibition displaying the original beeswax “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” sculpture and Degas pastels through January 11, 2015.

AMY HENDERSON is a cultural historian who writes about “the lively arts,” including Red, Hot & Blue: A Smithsonian Salute to the American Musical.  She is Historian Emerita at the National Portrait Gallery.