The current wave of Indigenous storytelling — from Reservation Dogs to Billy Luther’s own Frybread Face and Me — has been almost entirely a screen phenomenon, streamed and festival-launched. The American stage, by contrast, has rarely made room for a Native cast or a Native story told on its own cultural terms. That is the gap Luther is now trying to close, routing one of his earliest films into a form — musical theater — that has had almost no Native presence at scale.

As Variety first reported, Luther is adapting Miss Navajo, his documentary about the Miss Navajo Nation pageant, into a stage musical, and has brought in singer-songwriter Raye Zaragoza to write it into being. The show is in development, a rare pivot for a director whose reputation has been built entirely in film.

Miss Navajo followed Crystal Frazier, a young woman from near Table Mesa, New Mexico, through the pageant at the Navajo Nation Fair, where contestants are judged less on glamour than on fluency in language and custom — butchering a sheep, making fry bread, answering in Diné. Luther has since become one of Native cinema’s most visible directors: Frybread Face and Me, his 2023 coming-of-age feature, was executive produced by Taika Waititi and released through Ava DuVernay’s Array on Netflix.

Zaragoza is a pointed collaborator. The Los Angeles songwriter, of O’odham, Mexican and Japanese heritage, built her name on politically charged folk — “In the River,” her song against the Dakota Access Pipeline — and now scores Netflix’s all-Native Spirit Rangers. “I am thrilled to be working with Raye to bring ‘Miss Navajo’ to the stage,” Luther said, adding that “Raye’s thought provoking strength of Indigenous women resonates.”

The timing carries its own weight. The musical arrives roughly 19 years after the documentary premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, turning a portrait of a single pageant into a piece built to be performed. No theater, workshop dates or casting have been announced while the show remains in development.

There is a neat rhyme in the source material: a contest that already grades its contestants on whether they can carry their language and their culture, now rebuilt as a form that will ask a cast to sing exactly that.

Tags: musicals, Billy Luther, Frybread Face and Me, Indigenous Cinema, Miss Navajo, Raye Zaragoza

Billy Luther follows ‘Frybread Face’ to the theater, turning ‘Miss Navajo’ into a stage musical

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