Boston’s ambitious adaptation leverages the tricks of various performing arts trades and, after all these years, finally sets Natalie Portman’s doomed ballerina free.
The Swan Lake theme really is something. Was another such tune ever crafted that could be simultaneously applied to scenarios of tragic romance, psychological horror, and personal apotheosis? The alluring perversion of Tchaikovsky’s composition is at the heart of a brand new adaptation of a film that is itself an unconventional adaptation of the ballet. Darren Aronofsky’s thriller Black Swan, following a troubled ballerina who must dance both the pure Swan Queen Odette and her evil twin Odile, layered fresh interpretations of Swan Lake’s themes atop the ballet’s plot, including threatening doppelgangers and not being enough for the object of one’s adoration.
Now, the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) in Massachusetts has done something that was frankly baffling to us locals when we first heard of it: created a Black Swan musical, adding another medium to the proverbial artistic onion. A.R.T. is the birthplace of several fascinating musical adaptations, including 2024’s Gatsby: An American Myth (with choreography by Sonya Tayeh and songs by Florence Welch). The production premiered in the shadow of Broadway’s The Great Gatsby adaptation, and was set to receive a London reading as of 2025. Tayeh, the Tony-winning choreographer of Broadway’s Moulin Rouge! The Musical, is the ideal director for this production of Black Swan: an explosive reimagining, a monster that spars with influences of the original ballet, the acclaimed film, and the tradition of Broadway. The musical’s book is by Guggenheim Fellow Jen Silverman, with a soundtrack by Obie winner Dave Malloy.
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The film’s framework and fixation on doubles and mirrors are all there, but now excerpts and distortions of the original Swan Lake score weave in and out of electric instrumentals and intense lyrics. The early musical numbers are anchored in classical ballet moves, before we watch the choreography descend into wild contemporary styles as the story progresses. “In a traditional musical, you have writers working by themselves […] a choreographer builds dance to support the songs. Here, a lot of it has been the opposite,” music supervisor Or Matias said to Harvard Magazine. “Sonya would come up with an idea and say, ‘This is the kind of storytelling I’m looking to accomplish over this three-minute movement segment,’ and we would sit in a room with the dancers and build it together. Dave would sit there with his laptop and headphones while Sonya was doing movement and counts, and I would be bouncing between them.”
Melanie Moore steps into the role of Nina, who is warmer than she is as portrayed in Natalie Portman’s Oscar-winning turn: stage Nina is an endearingly neurotic professional ballerina who fantasises about being someone more uninhibited, even before she lands the dual lead role in Swan Lake. In both versions, Nina’s mind splinters as she is haunted by her dark alter ego, the unholy byproduct of her obsessive quest for perfection and her rivalry with fellow dancer Lily (Mila Kunis in the film, Jada Simone Clark on stage).
With opening night approaching, Nina’s mental strain is exacerbated by her mother, Erica (Barbara Hershey; renamed Barbara and played by Kate Jennings Grant on stage, or Mehry Eslaminia the night I saw it), a dancer who never made it and thus self-actualises through her daughter’s career, while director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) harasses Nina as he attempts to transform her into the more sensual Black Swan, molding her in the image of ousted prima ballerina Beth (Winona Ryder/Tory Trowbridge). On stage, however, the director is a woman: Margaux LeRoy (Amber Iman, performing a sassy, perceptive authority with subtle nuances of struggle), whose career hangs on her iconoclastic production of Swan Lake.
With this gender swap, the hierarchy of character dynamics is complete in a way that Aronofsky’s film falls short of. The inevitability of being replaced by a younger dancer is a clear theme in the film, but it hit me as I was rewatching it: Beth is the Black Swan once she has aged out of her prime, and Erica is the same for the Swan Queen. Nina and Lily are pitted against each other with their different artistic strengths, while the older women loom as a reminder that neither path leads to immortality. On top of the pyramid is the director, but while Thomas aggravates things with his absolute power over the company and sexual manipulation of the lead dancers, Margaux can claim to have some sense of what the ballerinas are going through as she pushes them to breaking point.
The musical also turns the company’s other dancers into true (and just fun) supporting characters. They all belong to a highly competitive industry that mercilessly burns through its artists, and we are reminded of this when time is found for them to bemoan their aching limbs and remind themselves that they “love this.” The ensemble’s restless song and dance is another tool to bring to life Nina’s psyche, which then reflects their own characters. This is useful when the show can’t use many of the film’s methods of conveying Nina’s state of mind, namely, claustrophobic and dizzying cinematography, though they manage to brilliantly transpose some of the feathery body horror.
Strobe lights and fog machines never did anyone wrong, and they are used magnificently to show reality fracturing and phantasmic power. Doppel (Ida Saki) is a new-ish character, a spectre who breaks away from Nina as she looks in the mirror and later physically materialises to properly dance with her. Doppel’s presence also underscores that Nina’s enemy and love isn’t Lily, but herself. Lily, as a result, fades into the background a bit, but she remains a stunningly cool personality, played to perfection by Clark.
The production is a whirlwind, but also a profound thematic evolution of Aronofsky’s story. I don’t think Nina’s coveted role is ever described as a dual one, because LeRoy is essentially retelling Swan Lake with the whole point being the Swan Queen becoming the Black Swan. She also isn’t trying to get a chaste Nina to play the Black Swan as seductive. The theme of sexual liberation is still there as Nina hallucinates her night with Lily, which is much more tender as an enchanting dance facilitated by the ensemble lifting the two women. But LeRoy wants Nina to go somewhere beyond all of this in her dance, beyond perfection, or even love. And we see how hard Nina is working her body, we feel the sleep she is not getting in pursuit of an artistic ascendence that escapes description.
Silverman teases in their note in the program: “How often have any of us taken adrenaline-fueled leaps, lead with savage instincts, or rushed headlong toward something we wish for—at all costs—in our own lives? When our Black Swans speak through us, we are powerful and untamed, we throw off the cage of expectation and etiquette — we become reckless creatures of hunger and desire. How can any of us live like this? But also… how can we not?” The monochromatic palette and the oppressive male gaze of the film are relevant, telling an effective story about grasping at a freer identity, but its vision of Odile is ultimately still defined by a socially curated ideal of femininity. This new Black Swan is untamed.
Black Swan runs until July 12 at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
