Tales of struggling artists are nothing new, but the 2010 movie “Black Swan” was a rare bird. The thriller about ambition, rivalry and human frailty, set inthe ballet world, evoked visceral reactions — from adrenaline highs to pull-pinions-from-your-flesh shudders.
Now a team of artists has turned that film into a stage musical, attracted not only by the dramatic and visual potential of the pressure-cooker dance setting but also by the story’s unsettling psychological currents.
The world premiere “Black Swan” opened officially June 3 at the American Repertory Theater, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with music, lyrics and orchestrations by Dave Malloy (best known for “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812”); book by Jen Silverman (“The Roommate,” “The Moors”); and direction and choreography by Sonya Tayeh (a Tony-winning choreographer for “Moulin Rouge! The Musical”).
Like the movie, the musical centers on Nina, an anxious ballerina whose zeal and perfectionism vault her to the lead in “Swan Lake.” As she rehearses the parallel roles of the Swan Queen and her raven-plumed doppelgänger, Nina strives to do justice to both, courting madness — and glimpsing her own terrifying dark side — along the way.
“What we’re investigating in the musical is this duality that every person has inside of them,” Silverman says. As part of that duality, “the world of the black swan is the world of your shadow side stirring inside you. Your instincts. Your hunger. Your reckless affinity for the electricity that you’re being pulled toward.”
ART has a track record of birthing or nurturing buzzy productions: “Great Comet,” “Life of Pi” and the Tony-winning LBJ drama “All the Way” are among the shows seen there en route to Broadway.
The “Black Swan” musical has been in the works for years. Entertainment heavyweights Kevin McCollum and Gail Berman independently had the idea to adapt the film into a musical and set about acquiring the rights around 2014. The two decided to collaborate, and Darren Aronofsky, who directed the movie, joined as a producer. After seeing “Great Comet” on Broadway, McCollum and Berman engaged Malloy, and he became the first creative artist to sign on.
In 2020, during the pandemic lockdown, the producers contacted Silverman. “It was so thrilling to be talking about theater at that moment, and to be imagining a future in which we could all build something,” Silverman says.
After ART got involved in 2024, the development process included workshops to develop the script, the movement and — a key element — the illusions, designed by Chris Fisher and Skylar Fox.
The creators had their work cut out for them. The movie, which featured a story by Andres Heinz, earned several Academy Award nominations, including best picture, and Natalie Portman won best actress for her portrayal of Nina. Some in the ballet community, however, bridled at what they saw as tired clichés about competitiveness, body image and abusive power dynamics in the industry. (“10 Years Later, Ballerinas Still Hate ‘Black Swan,’” a headline noted at the film’s 10th anniversary.)
“Films and TV shows that are made about the dance world often resort to stereotypes,” says Ida Saki, who plays a mysterious figure named Doppel in the new “Black Swan” musical. Saki, an alumna of Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet and Broadway’s “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’,” says that in the “Black Swan” movie, some clichéd material “was definitely sprinkled in.”
But the musical is a different story, she says: “I truly feel like this musical really taps into some more subtleties of what it is like being a dancer.” She appreciates, for instance, that it avoids overdone scenes of performers “taking off the pointe shoe, and the toenail is being ripped off, and the feet are all bloody.” And the show, she says, portrays a mindset she has discerned in dance in recent years: “awareness that your body is your instrument, and you have to take care of it to the best of your abilities.”
Silverman says much thought went into tweaking the story to speak to current times, with the production’s dancers consulted regularly to get details right. From a dance perspective, in any case, the mixed reaction to the movie is no reason not to adapt it, says D.C. choreographer Diane Coburn Bruning, who is not involved in the “Black Swan” musical.
“I believe most viewers recognized the movie as a psychological thriller with melodramatic exaggeration,” says Bruning, the artistic director of D.C.’s Chamber Dance Project. “While it contains some hard truths, these have been more openly addressed and exist to hopefully a lesser degree in our world today.” The famed 1948 ballet movie “The Red Shoes,” she adds, “had ballet purists up in arms, but, ah, what it did to bring ballet to a mainstream audience!”
The new musical’s creative team has thought about, and made choices that address, issues that made the movie problematic to some. Perhaps most notably, the person who casts Nina in “Swan Lake” now is not a lecherous man but a visionary woman — a #MeToo-era-attuned switch that keeps questions of sexual abuse from swamping the story.
That visionary dancemaker figure (portrayed by Amber Iman) reinvents “Swan Lake,” supplanting the traditional choreography with her idiosyncratic steps and sidelining toe shoes. She even gives the tale a feminist twist, dispensing with the standard prince and the evil wizard: Her swan protagonists seize their own destinies.
Nina’s often self-destructive push for perfection is still key to the story. But the fact is, “dancers are technicians, and we’re perfectionists,” says Melanie Moore, who won Season 8 of the dance competition show “So You Think You Can Dance” and who plays Nina in the musical. As the “Black Swan” heroine notches artistic wins, “it feels so tragic, but also you feel so proud of her,” Moore says.
As for the madness theme, it required a delicate treatment.
“Sonya and I talked about that a lot,” Silverman says. One priority was ensuring that the audience shares Nina’s perceptions — “her reality is our reality” — rather than viewing her from afar as crazy.
For Tayeh, the madness plotline gets at real truths about the magnetic pull of an artistic calling.
“There is an incredible amount of sacrifice to be an artist, an incredible amount of madness,” she says. “I watch dancers lose themselves. I watch myself lose time, go from hour one to hour six, and have no idea how we got there, because I’m watching such extraordinary work happening. So, sure it’s madness, and maddening. But what is it when you love something that much?”
Art, Tayeh adds, can be “like life or death for people. I don’t know anything else. I don’t want to know anything else. It’s the only thing that makes me feel the most alive — and breaks my heart every day.”
Black Swan Through July 12 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. americanrepertorytheater.org.