When audiences and critics assembled in 2016 to witness the premiere of Minnesota Opera’s “The Shining,” the enthusiasm — and the anticipation for what it could mean for the art form — were stratospheric.
If you go
Opera Colorado will present “The Shining” Feb. 26-March 6 at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House in the Denver Performing Arts Complex. Tickets and info: operacolorado.org or 303-468-2030.
Sure, there had been an unusual number of new operas created in that decade and many of them were exceptional, relevant to the times and listener-friendly. But none carried the potential to bring so much attention, and so many new customers, to the opera business.
There was the creative team of composer Paul Moravec and librettist Mark Campbell, both Pulitzer Prize winners who were leading their field with forward-looking work. There was the adventurous artistic staff at Minnesota Opera itself, which against all expectations had earned a reputation for incubating original works that resonated widely.
Most of all, there was the title itself, which began life as novel written by Stephen King, the wildly popular author who made horror respectable, and which had morphed into a film starring Jack Nicholson that got off to a slow start (hey, it opened the same weekend as “The Empire Strikes Back”) but went on to become a cinematic icon that regularly appears on best-ever film lists. America loves “The Shining.”
And, in fact, when the curtain went down on the opera’s unveiling in May 2016, everyone in St. Paul’s Ordway Theater seemed to love this musical version. too. The writers found an elegant and eerie voice that deftly captured the mood and edginess of King’s plot and characters. The staging was boldly bloody and high-tech enough to make the penultimate fiery explosion of the creepy Overlook Hotel feel palpable even to folks high up in the balcony. This opera was a winner.
Then … not so much happened. “The Shining” kind of disappeared. No major resurrections in other cities, no fresh productions that could take the special effects even higher.
The opera is still destined to be a classic. It has so much goodness going for it; no doubt, people will pay to see it wherever may rise up in the future. It just happened yet.
Why the well-reviewed “The Shining” has stalled while other recent, American-made works — like, say, “Dead Man Walking” or the war-themed “Silent Night” — are morphing into repertory standards is something of a mystery, and one that may be resolved with upcoming repeats of Minnesota’s staging set for Denver’s Opera Colorado this month and Lyric Opera of Kansas City shortly after.
Part of the delay was caused by the pandemic. Opera companies did plan to stage the work, only to have their programming called off when theaters across the globe went dark. Opera Colorado originally expected the show to open its 2020 season. Here we are, already in 2022.
Another part might be due the aura of King himself, a man of mystery with a reputation for keeping a tight reign over his creative output.
“There was somehow a rumor that got out in the business that it was impossible to get the rights from Stephen King,” Campbell said in an interview last week. “Opera companies got shy.”
That is simply not true. King does not control where or how the opera is performed, Campbell said. While he did insist on approval of the opera before it was first staged, he was never fussy or overly involved.
In fact, Campbell said, when he submitted his final draft to King on Thanksgiving week in 2015, he received the official nod less than 24 hours later. King, who is accustomed to the give-and-take necessary with adaptations, “did not request any changes or anything,” said Campbell.
In the end, it might just be that the genre, horror, is a bit much for opera. The art form does ghosts and deaths scenes very well, and it’s not above a little gore. Audiences have been watching that infamous severed head come out on a platter in Strauss’ “Salome” for more than a century. There’s also Stephen Sondheim’s bad-barber epic “Sweeney Todd,” which is popular with opera companies, though it is really more of a musical play.
Stephen King-level psycho-drama — lurking spirits, domestic abuse, outright cruelty — may be too intense for audiences more used to their darkness metered out with far-from-scary sensibilities of titles, such as the ominous but cartoonish guilt-fest “Don Giovanni.”
But “The Shining” is the best argument out there that opera can be a fitting format for horror, perhaps even better than cinema, which relies on spoken dialogue. Moravec squeezes frightening sounds out of the orchestra, and they go much deeper than assigning the sort of shrill outbursts to the violin section that audiences familiar with horror films have come to expect. He builds in themes that laboriously increase the tension right up until the big bang that ends this familiar story.
“Music is an abstract art form and it goes to these crazy, dark places that words can’t go — and that’s what horror does,” said Campbell.
For his part, Campbell adapts the story — man takes family to abandoned, haunted hotel in the snowy Rocky Mountains; man goes insane; man torments wife and child — in ways that allow characters to develop and the narrative to progress with logic. In that way, the opera is better than the off-the-charts movie, and more like the work of literary fiction King created in 1977.
Campbell, who has written a considerable 40 librettos, several of them adaptations of existing material, said that he examined both versions of “The Shining” as he was plotting the words. While he enjoyed them on their merits, the film offered less of a dramatic arc. Lead character Jack Torrance goes “from dumb to dumb” in director Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 scare flick, while the novel offered “a character I could care about in Jack Torrance,” said Campbell.
With that as his inspiration, it’s better for audiences to not go into the opera house expecting to hear movie-only lines like Nicholson’s signature “Here’s Johnny!”
Still, the piece retains the spirit of the beloved and feared “The Shining” as well as its cast of freaks, including the Grady Twins, little sisters who you don’t want to run into in an abandoned hotel — even if that hotel, which was based on the actual Stanley Hotel in nearby Estes Park, feels in a way like home to many Coloradans.
It’s also full of visceral thrills and special effects, thanks in part to an excess of projections that convey deep mystery and a sensational incendiary ending.
The piece will be altered slightly from its premiere. Moravec and Campbell inserted a new aria for Jack meant to add an extra layer to his character and to give the overall work the sort of showpiece opera that fans treasure.
But it fits with their original intention, which was to go to a place that opera, and horror, have never gone before. What do the two genres have in common? What can they offer each other? You have to hear it to understand.
“You can’t explain that feeling,” said Campbell, “But somehow the addition of music makes it all scarier and more awful. “
If things go well in Denver, expect to hear more of “The Shining” in years to come, and maybe more operas that dare to go very, very dark.
