‘The Shining’: Opera based on Stephen King’s horror masterpiece comes to SF
'The Shining': Opera Parallele presents the regional premiere of Paul Moravec and Mark Campbell's take on Stephen King's beloved novel.
A few years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Paul Moravec was thinking about subjects for a new opera. He considered a number of sources — and then friends suggested “The Shining.”
“I thought, ‘Oh my God,’ what an idea,’” Moravec said in a recent call from New York. He knew the Stanley Kubrick film, but hadn’t read the Stephen King novel that was Kubrick’s source. Once he did, he and award-winning librettist Mark Campbell went to work; the opera made an acclaimed world premiere at Minnesota Opera in 2016, and has since been produced to rave reviews at Opera Colorado and Lyric Opera of Kansas City.
Now “The Shining” is making its West Coast premiere, in a new Opera Parallèle production directed by Brian Staufenbiel, conducted by Nicole Paiement and starring baritone Robert Wesley Mason in the leading role of Jack Torrance. Performances are June 2-4 at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
“The Shining” follows Torrance and his family as they spend a winter in Colorado’s abandoned Overlook Hotel, and Moravec, in a call from New York, said the similarities between King’s novel and the Kubrick film pretty much end there.
“As brilliant as Kubrick is, and it’s a great movie, it’s not really what Stephen King wrote,” he said. “It’s more or less the same story, but with substantive differences.
“It’s a matter of tone,” he added. “King’s book is really a very warm and loving one — in a way, it’s a love story. Jack is a decent guy trying to do the right thing. He’s caught in an impossible dilemma. He’s also going mad — and that’s operatic.”
Moravec ‘s approach to the score was “just sitting down and imagining what these people sound like. Everybody has their own sound world, their own leitmotifs, their own identifying chord progressions or themes.”
The result, he said, “owes a lot to Wagner, that Wagnerian kind of storytelling. It’s not Wagner — he does his own thing, I do mine — but an important aspect of this is that the orchestra is driving the agenda. It’s not supporting the action; it is the action.”
Mason, who made a strong first Bay Area impression in the role of Jan in West Edge Opera’s 2019 production of Missy Mazzoli’s “Breaking the Waves,” agrees.
“Paul’s score is a real dramatic soundscape,” he said. “It’s remarkable, full of motifs and melodies. There’s such a range of experience in his writing, and the score moves from moments of real lyricism, like 20th-century Italian scores, to music that recalls Stravinsky’s terrifying percussive music. The whole piece is like one giant crescendo.”
Mason praised the way Staufenbiel has taken the cast on a deep dive into the story. “We don’t want to give the audience caricatures,” he said. “I have an incredible amount of empathy for Jack. He’s the story of a lot of men — a background of abuse and trauma, toxic masculinity, ideals put upon him to be the man. He’s got a massive temper problem — which is how he gets to the Overlook.”
Moravec, meanwhile, has re-tooled his score for the theater’s intimate size and Parallèle’s 70-piece orchestra, and has been working remotely with conductor Paiement. “She’s terrific,” he said. “I’m thrilled that she’s paying such close attention — she’s really collaborating in this new orchestration.”
“The Shining” is widely considered a horror story, of the kind that doesn’t often appear in opera. But Moravec says he doesn’t necessarily think of it as belonging to that genre.
“Personally, I don’t like horror stories,” he said. “I’m an Edgar Allan Poe fan, but I don’t get into slasher movies. I think that in ‘The Shining,’ Stephen King transcends the genre. Yes, there are elements of horror. But I’m interested in the human relationships, the drama, the characters and the plot. It’s just a great story with a compelling dramatic situation — which gives way to song.
“The question for a composer is ‘why are people singing?’ It’s such a weird, unnatural thing to have people singing together onstage. But how you get over that is a dramatic situation with emotion so overpowering that it gives rise to song. ‘The Shining’ has that power, that intensity. I think of it like this — you put a tea kettle on, and at first nothing happens. Then the water boils, and it eventually sings. That’s opera — the boiling emotion, giving rise to song.”
Contact Georgia Rowe at growe@pacbell.net.
‘THE SHINING’
By Paul Moravec (music) and Mark Campbell (libretto), adapted from the Stephen King novel
When: 7:30 p.m. June 2-3, 2 p.m. June 4
Where: Blue Shield of California Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco
Tickets: $40-$180 general, $20 student; operaparallele.org.