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This spring, Portland Opera checks in to the Overlook Hotel.
The company is taking a big artistic swing and staging The Shining, an opera composed by Paul Moravec with a libretto by Mark Campbell, based on the novel by Stephen King. Yes, really. This is a far cry—but not an aria; there aren’t tons of arias in this production—from the opera classics by Verdi, Puccini or Bellini, though there is plenty of drama and death.
“Everyone knows The Shining, so it’s a very high bar and some people might be disappointed,” says Erin Neff, the stage director. “But this is an exciting chance that Portland Opera is taking.”
There will be a cast of terrifying ghosts, including twins in matching bonnets and blood-red bows, a creepy boiler room, and a busy typewriter, but a croquet mallet replaces the ax that terrorized the late Shelley Duvall. That’s because the opera is based on the book, not the 1980 Stanley Kubrick film. It delves much further into Jack Torrance’s inner life; it’s essentially an opera about the descent into alcoholism.
“The word ‘redrum’ is not said as much as I would like,” Neff admits.
Not only is taking on The Shining a high bar because of its place in the pop culture canon, the production will challenge opera audiences to open their minds to a super-creepy, contemporary work. Rather than lots of arias and repetitive lines and melodies, some of the music in The Shining has the cast make sound effects with their voices. Like screaming.
The artistic risk already seems to be paying off, at least at the box office: Opening night of the four-show run March 15-23 at the Newmark Theatre sold out in mid-February.
The plot revolves around Jack (baritone Robert Wesley Mason) and Wendy Torrance (soprano Rebecca Krynski Cox), who become the off-season caretakers of a remote mountain resort, the Overlook Hotel. Their clairvoyant son Danny (Flash Inouye) sees terrifying visions, and soon Jack is also gripped by the dangerous ghosts of the Overlook—and his own alcoholism and childhood trauma.
Portland Opera is not originating the show. It first premiered at the Minnesota Opera in 2016. The opera on the Newmark Theatre stage this March is a co-production of Portland Opera, Hawai’i Opera Theatre, and Opera Parallèle in San Francisco.
Alfrelynn Roberts, Portland Opera’s director of artistic planning and operations, saw The Shining in Atlanta in 2023. She was so blown away by the opera and its ticket sales—the Atlanta Opera sold out its run and had to add performances—that she bumped it up in Portland Opera’s schedule from 2026 to 2025. It’s just another way Portland Opera is shaking things up. The company announced on Feb. 25 that it is relocating its headquarters from the Southeast Waterfront’s Hampton Opera Center, where it dwelled for 22 years. It’s crossing the river to downtown Portland’s World Trade Center on Southwest Salmon Street.
Staging a show like The Shining is a way to attract new audiences to opera and reflect modern life onstage, Roberts says. (Fifty years old being pretty modern in the scope of opera, which started in the late 16th century Italy.) Orchestras developed pop music programming decades ago, playing scores of movies or video games, or catalogs of pop artists. To wit: The Oregon Symphony’s spring season features the music of the Rolling Stones, “Back to the ’80s” night, and Back to the Future in concert on the schedule right alongside classical works by Schumann, Mozart, Beethoven and Vivaldi.
“They found a way to bring pop culture into that space and to really show audiences that this music is really classical music,” Roberts says. “They did a really good job of that back in the ’80s. Opera didn’t make that pivot as well.”
Now, part of Roberts’ job is making sure Portland Opera’s season is programmed with balance between new work and the traditional canon. After The Shining comes the Giuseppe Verdi comedy Falstaff at the Keller Auditorium in May.
After all, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Not that traditional opera is always work, of course, but The Shining will be a much different night out, director Erin Neff says. For one thing, it’s only two hours long. She wants audiences to feel energized afterward (and still have time to get a drink).
“Hopefully, it’s going to be a feeling of excitement that you don’t have when you walk out of a four-hour Wagnerian slog going, ‘Oh my God, I’m exhausted. That was so heavy,’” she says. “Hopefully, you’ll leave feeling jacked.”
SEE IT: The Shining at the Newmark Theatre, 1111 SW Broadway, 503-241-1802, portlandopera.org. 7:30 pm March 15, 19 and 21; 2 pm Sunday, March 23. $25–$106.