Unlike some reviewers who argue that The Shining has legs, I’m unsure if this opera will make it into the privileged realm of regularly produced shows. Whether it does or doesn’t become part of the canon, Portland Opera hit the jackpot with this production in its ongoing battle to find new audiences. 

Late March’s four-performance run (March 15 through March 23) at the 880-seat Newmark Theatre was sold out – every performance. Granted, the venue was not the 2,990-seat Keller reserved for anticipated popular operas with high ticket sales.

The enthusiastic audience was younger than usual, judging from my March 19th attendance. Tattoos and extravagant outfits were everywhere. Some of the audience’s get-ups were almost as outrageous and quirky as those of the ghosts who served as the opera chorus at the Overlook Inn’s wild Felliniesque “party.”

Alina Bokovikova, one of many cast and creative-team members making their PO debuts, designed the costumes. She did a bang-up job with the ghosts’ eccentric spooky get-ups, and she nailed the ‘70s-era looks of the Torrance family – corny ski sweaters, ill-fitting blue jeans, and Wendy Torrance’s hideous long crocheted sweater. The Torrances are not Yuppies taking a break from the real world; they are a struggling family needing money and time to heal their lives.

If you don’t know the story, Jack Torrance (convincingly sung and acted by baritone Robert Wesley Mason), his wife Wendy (soprano Rebecca Krynski Cox), and son Danny (talented young Portland actor Flash Inouye)–who possesses a sixth sense that he shares with the hotel cook Dick Hallorann (bass-baritone Quinton Gardner)–take a job as off-season caretakers of the Overlook, a remote Rocky Mountain hotel. Danny, who speaks in words, not in song, also expresses himself with his body. With his special sense and otherworldly communication “gift,” which Halloran calls “shining,” he is preternaturally attuned to the world and to its future. 

This two-hour production was shared with Opera Parallèle in San Francisco and Hawai’i Opera Theatre, though it hasn’t morphed much from the original Shining production premiered in 2016 at Minneapolis Opera. It was based on Stephen King’s 1977 blockbuster book about the isolated history-haunted Overlook Hotel and its caretaker Jack Torrance’s spin into insanity. The opera is not based on the 1980 Stanley Kubrick movie, still considered a major horror flick, perhaps a major draw for the younger opera-goers. King reportedly hated the film and faulted it for its superficial representation of characters, among other things. So in this version, you don’t see an axe, though Jack does have another oddball weapon.

Was the opera scary? A little. Certainly it’s unsettling, and the music, using such low-register instruments as bass clarinet, the rarely deployed bass trombone – at least in opera – double bass, contrabassoon and percussion, pulls us into the intended slow-growing terror. Damien Geter, an opera singer and opera composer himself as well as PO’s co-artistic director with soprano Karen Slack, conducted. His grasp of the music presented challenges with a huge cast to manage and a score that see-saws at quite a clip from fiery human interaction, words included, to the supernatural and then all over again. Geter had a lot to control, and he knew what he was doing.

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I didn’t love the music – there were not enough gorgeous long melodic lines for me – but I admired how it captured the mental deterioration of Torrance and the Torrances’ precarious world falling apart. The Torrances had their doubts about the inn and their marriage before they started the caretaking job, so the downward slope was in motion. The libretto was tight and followed the most dramatic plot points of the book. Mark Campbell has written 41 librettos and knows how to build a story and move it forward.

Love, death and power

If not convincingly scary to me, was The Shining a multi-layered opera, not just a compelling story put to music?

Yes, and at times it was over the top, as opera often is. This is especially true as the hotel’s ghosts take over the stage, past murderers and history are exposed, such minor characters as Stuart Ullmann and Delbert Grady (both roles sung entertainingly by tenor Nathan Granner), and the menacing basement boiler–which Jack is warned must be taken good care of or blow its top–came alive with the clever scenery (Jacquelyn Scott), moody lighting (Jim French) and extraordinary AI-generated video work originally created by David Murakami. The visuals and stage architecture are very powerful and scarier than the music; it was easy to be distracted by them and forget the music.

Love, death and power, The Shining’s thematic bones, shape the opera and make The Shining an opera, composer Paul Moravec hints in his program notes. Factor in the conjuring-up of a supernatural world of the hotel and of the telepathic Danny. Then add to those aspects the complexity of the main character, Jack Torrance, who goes increasingly nuts as the story progresses. He doesn’t have an aria, but as Moravec said, the opera is his aria. He is onstage a lot. His character is by far the most compelling and well developed. Fervent opera-lovers, however, would have missed the arias. The opera isn’t loaded with them. 

Jack is a complicated and unsteady man, worried about his manhood, career and fatherhood. If you look a little deeper into King’s biography, the author knew him as well as himself. King suffered at the time he was writing the book from heavy drinking and severe impatience with his family, like Jack Torrance who has a history of alcoholism and an easily triggered violent temper. Torrance has lost his job at a prep school for issues related to losing his temper – again. He has abused his family physically. He is a tortured man, before the hotel gets under his skin and further tortures him, along with his supposedly dead father played to the hilt by the cane-wielding Portland bass-baritone Richard Zeller, who haunts Torrance at the hotel along with the parade of other ghosts. Torrance’s language sinks into profanity as the story moves on. The opera’s music mirrors his character’s growing insanity and isolation, and for those reasons alone, the opera was worth the price of admission.

The Shining ends on a sappy note, with Wendy and Danny surviving the chaos, relaxing and fishing on a calm blue mountain lake, Halloran in their camp, but that sentimentality is more the shortcoming of the King story than of the opera. Meanwhile, we last see Jack staring at the boiler, the ghosts urging him to move out of the way. With steam built up like Jack’s exhausted brain and overworked nerves, the ancient boiler explodes along with Jack (though the Jack part we only imagine).

The opera is “absolutely absurd and perfect,” stage director Erin Neff claims in her program notes. Moravec, who won a Pulitzer (not for this opera but in 2004 for Tempest Fantasy), added that “the power of opera arises from its essentially primal irrational nature,” and certainly this piece lives up to that. 

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The Shining is contemporary but not brand new. New operas are constantly being produced. In the last five seasons, Operawire reported that 2,581 different operas were performed. Of those,  949 were by living composers, representing  more than one-third of all works staged in that period. So opera companies are getting braver at showcasing new operas. The Shining is 8 years old, not as seasoned as Mozart’s 233–plus-years-old oeuvre, but neither is The Shining the last word in interpreting our world.