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The Shining: A Chilling Artistic Triumph By Thomas May, MusicalAmerica.com May 16, 2016
St. PAUL—It seems fitting that the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, where Minnesota Opera makes its home, is located just a mile-and-a-half from the F. Scott Fitzgerald House, where the author revised his first novel. As a major incubator of new works, Minnesota ranks among the vanguard of companies striving to create The Great American Opera for our time.
Its most recent effort, The Shining, is by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Paul Moravec and librettist Mark Campbell. The company sold out the 1,900-seat Music Theater for all four performances (this review is of the second, on May 12), but in addition to that box office success, The Shining represents an artistic triumph. One of the most consistently gripping works of music theater to appear on the American stage in recent seasons, The Shining deserves to have a robust future life.
Brian Mulligan as Jack, struggling with his inner demons
Mining a pop culture icon for operatic material is, of course, a dangerous ploy: close familiarity with the source material can set the audience up for disappointing comparisons, while snooty critics lob charges of pandering for the sake of publicity. This operatic treatment of Stephen King’s breakthrough horror-thriller (1977) manages not only to distill the narrative intensity of the original but—its most significant achievement—transforms The Shining into valid operatic terms that transcend the thriller trappings.
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There are actually two pop culture icons here: the masterful horror film by Stanley Kubrick (1980) and King’s novel. The opera’s creators opted to base their treatment on the latter, with its deeper psychological focus, which frames the supernatural events in the Overlook Hotel within the context of protagonist Jack Torrance’s history as the victim of a pattern of child abuse across the generations.
As a result, the stakes in the opera acquire an almost archetypal, mythic quality, culminating in a redemptive sacrifice: Jack and his wife Wendy, together with their young son Danny, are desperate for “a fresh start” and greet the magnificent, soon-to-be-empty resort hotel as the stage for a reconciliation. Yet as he becomes increasingly obsessed with the Overlook’s violent past, Jack experiences the unleashing of his own psychic demons and he must face up to the forces driving him to destroy his family.
It’s easy to understand why Mark Campbell is now a highly sought-after librettist by a remarkable diversity of composers. Using simple, unaffected language and a fast-paced dramaturgy—the opera clocks in at just over two hours—Campbell supplies a sturdy framework for Moravec to wield his considerable gifts as a musical dramatist.
Moravec’s richly textured orchestral writing--vividly shaped by conductor Michael Christie--is particularly impressive in establishing the center of gravity for each rapidly unfolding scene. He generates suspense with a gesture reminiscent of moments from Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle: winding, enigmatic phrases punctuated by an eerie pause. Moravec’s method here shares something with film cues in the continual gear-shifting among divergent types of material, which the composer navigates with virtuoso fluency. Overall, the hard-driving momentum proves to be spectacularly effective, but it allows the composer relatively few opportunities to develop lyrical beauties that tantalizingly but briefly emerge (notably, in an aria for Wendy and in the epilogue).
Bringing all this to life was a first-rate cast led by Brian Mulligan, who used his powerful baritone and looming physicality to explore the terrifying drama of Jack’s internal battle. Exuding immense charm in the opening scenes, and a genuine desire to reconnect with Wendy and turn things right, he conveyed a sense of the inevitability behind the dark forces that torment him—a veritable operatic curse—and of the strength he needed to summon for the climactic scene.
As Wendy, soprano Kelly Kaduce was fully in command of Moravec’s high-lying lines, a key exponent of the note of hope that is a counterpart to Jack’s descent, springing up again in the tragedy’s aftermath. Wendy balances protectiveness toward her family with a palpable fear as she witnesses the progressive derangement of the man she loves. Tasked with a good deal of stage time in the speaking role of six-year-old son Danny (whose telepathic gift is the source of the title), the phenomenally talented Alejandro Vega was an agent of the opera’s most moving interchange in the superior second act (during which Moravec had him briefly sing in treble voice): the turning point when Jack suddenly sees what he must do to free his family.
Arthur Woodley stood out as the cook Dick Hallorann, a benign, alternative father figure who sees the story through to its resolution. Also impressive were David Walton as the ghostly Overlook caretaker Delbert Grady, one of the figures urging Jack to “correct” his family for their misbehavior, and Mark Walters as the disturbingly haunting father of Jack.
Production values were excellent across the board. Erhard Rom’s dazzling, readily reconfigurable sets capture the Overlook’s sprawling elegance and, at the same time, its claustrophobia. Together with Robert Wierzel’s lighting, 3D projections by 59 Productions enhance the setting with realistic depictions of nature—another important character in the story—and Kärin Kopischke’s costumes add touches of ghoulish decadence in the ballroom scenes, where revelers of crimes past make themselves known to Jack. Director Eric Simonsson (whose idea it was to adapt The Shining into an opera) wisely clarified that the horrors we see emanate from Jack’s internal struggle—reality more chilling than any monster bash.
Photo by Ken Howard
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