‘Little Dancer’ at the Kennedy Center, with the accent on ‘dancer’

Love of ballet flows from every pore and plie of Little Dancer. The new Kennedy Center musical showcases most rewardingly the technical gifts of Tiler Peck, a beguiling New York City Ballet star cast here as the gamine model for the celebrated Degas sculpture of the show’s title. That ardor for the dance form and its classical rigor are filtered through the becoming choreography of director Susan Stroman, who, in the footsteps of Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins, has created as a finale for this musical — still, it seems, deeply in progress — a delightful dream ballet, with Peck at its center. But musical theater doesn’t live by dance alone. In many of its other particulars — having to do with plotting, character development and expressing interior life through song — Little Dancer feels as if it has only scratched the surface of possibility of its story, about the hopes of a talented young dancer, both immortalized and dashed on an artist’s pedestal. So Stroman, composer Stephen Flaherty and book and lyrics writer Lynn Ahrens would seem to have more work to do if Little Dancer is to sweep out the cliches and present itself as more than just another pretty face.