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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
no subject
Date: 2026-06-19 05:29 am (UTC)I am primarily familiar with Black Swan (2010) as the movie that my aunt, for decades a professional dancer, hated so much that she arrived on our doorstep and immediately rented The Red Shoes (1948) to recuperate with, but I like the idea of doing structural critique with it! I am sorry it only three-quarters works. The non-engagement with its own casting sounds rough.
I genuinely really loved the number where Nina goes to visit the discarded prima in the hospital and gets assaulted by spectral Nutcrackers
That, however, sounds pretty cool.
no subject
Date: 2026-06-19 05:52 am (UTC)(Also amused by the whole "let's update it by making it about women destroying each other" because... surely Black Swan's whole deal is that Odette :: Rothbart = Nina :: her mother? See: dubious psychosexual origin stories for lesbianism, Hayes code, etc. Adding a Woke Choreographer in place of [thinly veiled George Balanchine] is a funny choice there.)
no subject
Date: 2026-06-19 04:29 pm (UTC)For me, watching the movie before the show put me in the very pleasant position of thinking to myself 'well, that was fine and I have no strong emotions about it, so I will be equally happy if the show is much better, much worse, or equally fine in a different way.' I do feel, like, a greater sense of unactivated potential in the show ... I'd like to see it get better .... but also a theatrical work I guess always has that sense of 'it could get better' potential in a way that is not true for a film.
no subject
Date: 2026-06-19 04:42 pm (UTC)(It is a funny choice!! I think the goal was to parallel the Woke Choreographer and Nina's mother and have them be sort of equal and opposite pressures in re: dubious psychosexual origin stories for lesbianism -- there were a couple bits of staging that made me think that was the intended outcome -- but again it does not work because the woke choreographer is wayyyyy too normal, and the relationship between Nina and her mom is not quite as capital-W Weird as it is in the movie either tbh.)
no subject
Date: 2026-06-19 05:19 pm (UTC)You just never know what you're going to get with the A.R.T.
no subject
Date: 2026-06-19 05:59 pm (UTC)Jokes aside, what an interesting project this sounds like! Obviously, to me, the number one thing going on here is that it sounds like the directors understand that Swan Lake IS in fact about the corps, so that sounds fantastic! I would unquestionably watch the fictitious ballet getting made here.
"LeRoy did nothing wrong! LeRoy empowered Nina!" -- This sounds like a missed opportunity, for this to be a "Mr. B" situation where the mentorship/musehood relationship is both empowering and abusive at once, on purpose, which is such a nasty little dynamic.
Sometimes… colorblind casting… is worse… I agree that that sounds very jarring, and to never have LeRoy and Lily speak to each other--!
May I ask, what was the dancing and the music like in the musical? Was it balletic, or more Broadway? (And having remembered to google, I see that the actual choreographer is Sonya Tayeh? Combat jazz!)
no subject
Date: 2026-06-19 07:01 pm (UTC)I'm not convinced that making Black Swan without heterosexuality is, in and of itself, a more progressive choice than Black Swan with toxic heterosexuality. Depending on the execution, it could also be reactionary and misogynistic in a "girls are so catty!" kind of way.