Susan Stroman’s musical about Marie van Goethem, the young dancer behind Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, has its West End premiere with Tiler Peck in the title role.
Susan Stroman’s musical Little Dancer, about the girl who posed for Degas, has its West End premiere at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in St James’s on Monday 15 February 2027. Tiler Peck takes the title role.
Edgar Degas began his wax sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen around 1880 and showed it in 1881 in a real tutu. The model was Marie van Goethem, a Belgian pupil of the Paris Opéra’s ballet school.
The musical imagines her life in the corps de ballet of Belle Époque Paris, between her family’s poverty and the attentions of wealthy men. Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, who wrote Ragtime, created it with Stroman, who directs and choreographs.
It opened at the Kennedy Center in Washington in 2014 and was reworked as Marie, Dancing Still for Seattle in 2019. Theatre Royal Drury Lane gave it as a one-night concert in July 2025. The six-week season runs to Saturday 27 March 2027.
Peck, a principal dancer of New York City Ballet, has created the role at every stage of its life and makes her West End debut. Julian Ovenden plays Degas, with Laura Pitt-Pulford as the adult Marie and Josefina Gabrielle as Martine.