New operas can scare you for all the wrong reasons. You worry that the sets will malfunction, or the singers. Sometimes, you’re just frightened that the thing will never end.
But the Minnesota Opera’s production of “The Shining” – and it can be truly terrifying – puts you on edge the right way, with fearless stagecraft, a daredevil score and a libretto that’s unafraid to take audiences who avoid horror as a matter of habit and good taste into another world.
This musical version of Stephen’s King’s novel about the remote Colorado hotel that turns a man into a homicidal manic succeeds at nearly everything it attempts. It marries the highest of art forms with one of the most suspect in popular culture. King’s story is opened up and realized in new ways, and opera actually looks fun for a change.
That’s because composer Paul Moravec comprehends the situation at hand. His music is not overly serious or, as it might have been, camp, though it has elements of both. Moravec gets that most people know this story from the iconic, 1980 film starring Jack Nicholson, so he speaks the language of movie music — the shrill violin, the pulsing tempos of rising emotions, the bent note meant to warn audiences that things aren’t what they seem.
But those moments fit into a generally lush, and even romantic score, at least in the first act. In the second, as troubled father Jack Torrance loses his sanity and goes after his family with an oversized croquet mallet, Moravec drops the conventions, classical and cinematic, and etches out eerie tones where anything goes.
Librettist Mark Campbell is sparse but effective with the words, clever, and generous with the off-color language that’s natural to a plot that starts with a cute family of three heading to a new life in the mountains and ends with the mom slashing dad repeatedly with a razor blade. Things can be a little squishy, especially in the beginning when they sing of being “as happy as the day we were married,” and at the end when an overly sentimental aria closes the show.
But it is generally right on target, alternately tense and surprisingly funny, even in the parts written for ghosts egging the flannel-clad protagonist on to the ultimate violent transgression.
The composer and librettist give the performers notes they can sing and act, and baritone Brian Mulligan and soprano Kelly Kaduce creating the roles from nothing, ran with that at St. Paul’s Ordway Center for the Performing Arts. So did bass Arthur Woodley as the hotel’s supernaturally gifted cook. It is rare to attend an opera where neither the program’s plot synopsis nor the supertitles are needed to follow the story, even operas written in English. But that was the case here and it was due to deft deliveries and audience-centered stewardship of the material by director Eric Simonson and conductor Michael Christie.
In that way, “The Shining” is fully accessible to audiences new and old, and it was clear from the crowd (since it wasn’t old) that it succeeded in bring different faces into the theater. There are more and more new operas these days, but they’re all trying too hard to be important, to take on topics that are purposefully weighty. Just this month, we had the final days of “JFK” at the Fort Worth Opera and virtuous “The Scarlet Letter” at Opera Colorado. These are worthy subjects, no doubt, but every fresh piece doesn’t have to take on a seminal theme in 2016.
“The Shining” is fantasy, pure escapism and refreshing in that way. Set designer Erhard Rom and the animation outfit 59 Productions brought this point home, mixing traditional set pieces with projections that opened up mountain vistas, that made it snow relentlessly and that splattered blood across the stage from top to bottom. It was a high-tech effort that knew when a moment called for visceral, gory special effects or cartoon violence.
In that way, “The Shining” feels like opera ought to feel now. It moves at a contemporary pace and it builds like an action movie. It might have dropped King’s epilogue, which works at the end of a novel and just kills the climax of a live stage event, but it has a multi-sensory, quick-edit sensibility that matches the moment — maybe not the moment in most operas houses but in all the cultural places, real and virtual, that surround them.
This opera doesn’t try to be timeless and, like the new works popping up concurrently, it’s not aching for an immortal place in the standard repertoire. It’s trendy and preposterous and goes as low brow as it needs to go. As literature, it doesn’t attempt to teach us anything other than to be seriously careful about our hotel choices in the more remote parts of the Rocky Mountains.
“The Shining” is true to Stephen King and true to itself, to this production that just happened to take place in Minnesota. And that gives it the authenticity a work needs to live on.
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or @rayrinaldi
