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Jun. 18th, 2026 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsEarlier this week we saw new Black Swan musical, which felt so obviously necessary and important that it was only like a few days prior that I realized I had never actually seen the movie Black Swan. So! On Monday we watched Black Swan (2010) and then on Tuesday we went to see the show.
For those of you who missed Black Swan (2010), it's just under two hours of tightly-wound ballerina Natalie Portman getting cast as the lead in Swan Lake and then dramatically unraveling betwixt the combined pressures of controlling live-in stage mom, ambitious shadow-double understudy [ft. hallucinatory toxic yuri], and psychosexually exploitative artistic director Thomas Leroy.
Black Swan (the musical) (2026) is also two hours of a tightly-wound ballerina getting cast as the lead in Swan Lake and then dramatically unraveling, but there are some key differences; most significantly, there is no psychosexually exploitative artistic director! Instead, towards the beginning of the show, the company manager explains that the celebrity guest choreographer for Swan Lake has had to pull out unexpectedly ["cancelled," the corps mutter sagely to each other] and is going to be replaced by a different celebrity choreographer, Margaux LeRoy, who appears and immediately delivers a speech about how in her Swan Lake Reimagined there will be NO prince! NO evil wizard! It's ALL about the swans!
I admit I do think it's really funny that Jen Silverman and Dave Molloy were like 'please clap we've made a Black Swan musical without heterosexuality -- sorry I mean this cool feminist choreographer character who is certainly not our in-text stand-in has made a Swan Lake without heterosexuality. and you should clap for her.' But also I am really sympathetic to and interested in the project -- this adaptation is making an argument that voyeuristic sexual exploitation by domineering men is not the only kind of horror story you can tell about ballet, that you can focus the horror explicitly on a pressure-cooker of women in a toxic system fracturing against each other in various ways and have it be just as sharp and scary and powerful. I appreciate this as an adaptation tactic; I think the show gets like 75% of the way to being something that could, if successful, be better than the film.
Unfortunately, the problem is that the show is not able to prove its point because it is not actually just as sharp and destructive and powerful. The problem is that nothing is quite bad enough. LeRoy is not bad enough. I think it would be very easy to walk out of this show thinking "LeRoy did nothing wrong! LeRoy empowered Nina!" -- indeed while trying to remember LeRoy's first name I found a local review where the reviewer says The film presents Nina’s journey as a descent into a madness; in the A.R.T’s version it is healing. Okay, well, Nina does definitely stab herself at the end so I think that's pretty unambiguously not what they were going for, but the fact that anyone could see the show and come away with that impression indicates a degree of failure to execute on the psychological horror ...
The other big problem that could be a strength if it actually pushed on it is the casting: LeRoy and Lily (toxic yuri shadow double ambitious understudy) are played by black actresses, Nina is white. There is CERTAINLY interesting stuff to say, in this story about ballet as a toxic pressure cooker, about a black celebrity choreographer deciding to cast the brittle but technically perfect white girl as the lead in her Swan Lake production over the black girl that all the other characters think is the more expressive and interesting dancer. The production does not say it. LeRoy and Lily never have a conversation. Nina has several bits of closeted-lesbian dialogue about how much she envies how easy Lily always seems to have had everything in her career to date, and every time it brought me up full stop because like -- surely they know about colorism in ballet? Surely this had to be part of the thought process?
The thing I think does really work in this production is the corps. Black Swan (2010) is a very claustrophobic, impressionistic tightly-POV-focused film. The corps is barely present except as set dressing. Here, the show has done some work to make the company itself feel like a lived-in thing, a community full of personalities just as shredded by the pressure as Nina's and all jostling against each other to grasp onto a tiny bit of whatever it is that makes all of this worth it. Not all of them are women -- two of the most visible personalities in the corps are a pair of bitchy gay dancers constantly backbiting each other who could very easily function as jokes and instead come off IMO really successfully as another reflection of how the toxic dynamics at the center of the company ripple all the way down.
Speaking of reflections, other stuff I liked:
- the mirror work is REALLY cool, both the creepy special effects and just the way mirrors themselves are arranged onstage to have reflections appear and disappear in them throughout varyingly tense scenes
- very funny joke about running out of money and doing Coppelia as a modern production ... when I finished watching Black Swan (2010) I was like 'wow, that was a movie without a single joke in it. Weird adaptation choice for Mr. Dave Molloy who whatever else you can say about him is often a funny guy' and I DO think this show has some funny jokes about ballet and they are NOT the reason the production isn't horror enough
- I liked the choreography for the possibly-hallucinatory lesbian sex! the whole corps is metaphorically involved in a weird and interesting way!
- I genuinely really loved the number where Nina goes to visit the discarded prima in the hospital and gets assaulted by spectral Nutcrackers
For those of you who missed Black Swan (2010), it's just under two hours of tightly-wound ballerina Natalie Portman getting cast as the lead in Swan Lake and then dramatically unraveling betwixt the combined pressures of controlling live-in stage mom, ambitious shadow-double understudy [ft. hallucinatory toxic yuri], and psychosexually exploitative artistic director Thomas Leroy.
Black Swan (the musical) (2026) is also two hours of a tightly-wound ballerina getting cast as the lead in Swan Lake and then dramatically unraveling, but there are some key differences; most significantly, there is no psychosexually exploitative artistic director! Instead, towards the beginning of the show, the company manager explains that the celebrity guest choreographer for Swan Lake has had to pull out unexpectedly ["cancelled," the corps mutter sagely to each other] and is going to be replaced by a different celebrity choreographer, Margaux LeRoy, who appears and immediately delivers a speech about how in her Swan Lake Reimagined there will be NO prince! NO evil wizard! It's ALL about the swans!
I admit I do think it's really funny that Jen Silverman and Dave Molloy were like 'please clap we've made a Black Swan musical without heterosexuality -- sorry I mean this cool feminist choreographer character who is certainly not our in-text stand-in has made a Swan Lake without heterosexuality. and you should clap for her.' But also I am really sympathetic to and interested in the project -- this adaptation is making an argument that voyeuristic sexual exploitation by domineering men is not the only kind of horror story you can tell about ballet, that you can focus the horror explicitly on a pressure-cooker of women in a toxic system fracturing against each other in various ways and have it be just as sharp and scary and powerful. I appreciate this as an adaptation tactic; I think the show gets like 75% of the way to being something that could, if successful, be better than the film.
Unfortunately, the problem is that the show is not able to prove its point because it is not actually just as sharp and destructive and powerful. The problem is that nothing is quite bad enough. LeRoy is not bad enough. I think it would be very easy to walk out of this show thinking "LeRoy did nothing wrong! LeRoy empowered Nina!" -- indeed while trying to remember LeRoy's first name I found a local review where the reviewer says The film presents Nina’s journey as a descent into a madness; in the A.R.T’s version it is healing. Okay, well, Nina does definitely stab herself at the end so I think that's pretty unambiguously not what they were going for, but the fact that anyone could see the show and come away with that impression indicates a degree of failure to execute on the psychological horror ...
The other big problem that could be a strength if it actually pushed on it is the casting: LeRoy and Lily (toxic yuri shadow double ambitious understudy) are played by black actresses, Nina is white. There is CERTAINLY interesting stuff to say, in this story about ballet as a toxic pressure cooker, about a black celebrity choreographer deciding to cast the brittle but technically perfect white girl as the lead in her Swan Lake production over the black girl that all the other characters think is the more expressive and interesting dancer. The production does not say it. LeRoy and Lily never have a conversation. Nina has several bits of closeted-lesbian dialogue about how much she envies how easy Lily always seems to have had everything in her career to date, and every time it brought me up full stop because like -- surely they know about colorism in ballet? Surely this had to be part of the thought process?
The thing I think does really work in this production is the corps. Black Swan (2010) is a very claustrophobic, impressionistic tightly-POV-focused film. The corps is barely present except as set dressing. Here, the show has done some work to make the company itself feel like a lived-in thing, a community full of personalities just as shredded by the pressure as Nina's and all jostling against each other to grasp onto a tiny bit of whatever it is that makes all of this worth it. Not all of them are women -- two of the most visible personalities in the corps are a pair of bitchy gay dancers constantly backbiting each other who could very easily function as jokes and instead come off IMO really successfully as another reflection of how the toxic dynamics at the center of the company ripple all the way down.
Speaking of reflections, other stuff I liked:
- the mirror work is REALLY cool, both the creepy special effects and just the way mirrors themselves are arranged onstage to have reflections appear and disappear in them throughout varyingly tense scenes
- very funny joke about running out of money and doing Coppelia as a modern production ... when I finished watching Black Swan (2010) I was like 'wow, that was a movie without a single joke in it. Weird adaptation choice for Mr. Dave Molloy who whatever else you can say about him is often a funny guy' and I DO think this show has some funny jokes about ballet and they are NOT the reason the production isn't horror enough
- I liked the choreography for the possibly-hallucinatory lesbian sex! the whole corps is metaphorically involved in a weird and interesting way!
- I genuinely really loved the number where Nina goes to visit the discarded prima in the hospital and gets assaulted by spectral Nutcrackers
