Sunday at the Opera With Edgar

Many decades have passed since ballet played a significant role in musical theater, which may be one reason Little Dancer, a new musical directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, about the girl immortalized in the Edgar Degas statue of the title, has a whiff of the antique about it. This polished and pretty if less than transporting show, with book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens and music by Stephen Flaherty, features a dramatic ballet in which the young heroine relives the rapturous highs and demoralizing lows of her life. As danced by Tiler Peck, the brilliant New York City Ballet principal who plays the central role, this wordless passage brings the musical to a stirring climax. Although Ms. Stroman’s classical choreography is often more correct than inventive, here she finds a way to turn classroom steps expressive, as Marie (Ms. Peck) moves from shining pride in her immaculate technique to confusion and terror as visions of her past life buffet her around the stage. The musical, making its premiere at the Kennedy Center here, was inspired by the real-life Marie van Goethem, the teenage model for Degas’s famous sculpture, originally sculpted in wax and later cast in bronze. (The National Gallery of Art here has more than one version.) Not a lot is known about van Goethem’s life, so the show’s authors have imagined her trajectory through the rougher streets of Paris and the cutthroat world of the Paris Opera Ballet. Ms. Peck plays the young Marie, Rebecca Luker the girl all grown up. In a framing device set in Degas’s studio shortly after his death, the older Marie returns to finally see the sculpture she posed for — with, as we shall learn, life-changing consequences. Ms. Luker, in radiant voice, begins to reminisce in song about her first meeting with Degas (Boyd Gaines), celebrated for his paintings of dancers onstage and mostly off, in moments of quiet concentration or idle boredom as they prepare to perform. (The handsome set design, by Beowulf Boritt, employs projections, by Benjamin Pearcy, of some of the artist’s signature works.)