The Painted Girls

Like children at the dinner table, muses are usually relegated to being seen and not heard. The Painted Girls, based on real 19th-century Parisian sisters, gives a vivid voice to two of them: Marie van Goethem, famously bronzed in Degas’ Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, and her sister Antoinette, a player in the staging of Émile Zola’s working-class masterpiece L’Assommoir. For them there’s no glamour in dancing, modeling, and acting; it’s merely a way to stay (barely) afloat in the slums of Montmartre. If it were Les Miz, they’d break into song. Instead, we get something much richer. A-