http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/arts/dance/reassembling-the-little-dancer-by-degas-as-a-musical.html 2014-11-26 00:25:16 Reassembling the ‘Little Dancer’ by Degas as a Musical The “Little Dancer” sculpture by Degas is the inspiration for the new musical by the same name, starring Tiler Peck of New York City Ballet. === WASHINGTON — Like the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” There’s a double paradox here. On the one hand, the “Little Dancer” sculpture, though it has become a transcendent image, was radically anti-transcendent in style. It employed real hair and real ballet attire, covering them in wax (like preserving a butterfly in amber). Some parts of the sculpture allow us to see the truly mixed media with which Degas created her flesh beneath the wax. On the other hand, we don’t even know what happened to van Goethem after she was thrown out of the Paris Opera (in her teens, not long after the sculpture was exhibited). We don’t even know when or where she died. The new musical “Little Dancer” — with music by Stephen Flaherty, book and lyrics by The young Marie is played by the New York City Ballet dancer Ms. Peck does nothing poorly here; but it’s her dancing that becomes the show’s centerpiece. (This musical is a counterpart to the 19th-century French opera “La Muette de Portici,” whose heroine danced and acted but never sang.) Many of the virtuoso steps that Ms. Stroman gives Ms. Peck — the multiple fouetté turns, the strings of changements alighting on point — are stylistically anachronistic; but they’re fictions in which Ms. Peck, so artlessly youthful, makes us believe. Her virtuoso dancing has extraordinary liquidity; the tricky steps don’t look showy, they look like spontaneous outpourings. Yet the phrases of Ms. Stroman’s Paris Opera Ballet choreography never become poetic. And a climactic, all-dance nightmare for the young Marie is stock stuff, borrowed from the Broadway and Hollywood psychodramas of the mid-20th century. (Various figures from Marie’s story take the stage, with larger-than-life body language: She reacts, recoils, rejects, collapses, is successively appalled, anguished, defeated.) The central idea of Marie’s gift (and passion) for ballet is itself a Broadway-sentimental interpretation of Degas’s sculpture — which very obviously demonstrates that, at 14, Marie’s chief imperfections were physical and stylistic. His “Little Dancer” shows that Marie’s stance is poor, even by the standards of the other dancers he painted, drew or sculpted; her stomach is the most protuberant part of her skinny physique. Only as the show approaches its end do we finally see the statue. By which time — with Degas’s death — it has acquired the aura of eternity. Paradoxically, however, what it perpetuates is not the little dancer’s skill but her immaturity and flaws. Because the show keeps us on tenterhooks about the sculpture itself, the production builds up to the final revelation. This occurs twice over. First we see Degas’s creation center stage as his American painter friend Mary Cassatt shows it to the older Marie. Then we see Ms. Peck holding its pose within a surrounding glass frame. Even though Ms. Peck doesn’t reproduce the sculpture’s posture exactly, that’s O.K. by this stage in the show: We know we’re watching a myth. Yet the real Marie was probably expelled from the Opera for missing too many classes. We may find her statue touching, vulnerable — but it’s very possible to infer from it that she was reluctant to address ballet’s rigors. The musical claims that ballet is where Marie found herself, but the sculpture — currently the centerpiece of a superb one-room “Little Dancer” exhibition at the National Gallery of Art here — makes Marie, in terms of the art of ballet, forever an outsider. It’s a tribute to Ms. Peck that she makes you want to believe otherwise.