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Presaging next year’s season theme of “Love Through Adversity,” Portland Opera’s newest production is a modern literary adaptation based on Stephen King’s The Shining. With music by Paul Moravec and a libretto by Mark Campbell, The Shining premiered at the Newmark Theatre on Saturday, March 15. This debut helps the story metaphorically parallel—in addition to King’s personal demons of alcoholism and anger toward his family in the 1970s—the rise of two Trump administrations, which King has long vocally opposed.
The Shining’s long-standing significance in Oregon pop culture owes to Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation, wherein Timberline Lodge stands in for exterior shots of the Overlook Hotel. The playbill acknowledges the film’s cultural impact, and lobby decorations reference the scrawl of “REDRUM” and the ax with which Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance chops through a door.
The opera, which premiered in Minnesota in 2016, makes a point of staying true to the text and eschewing the more unique elements of the Kubrick film, which King would approve of, having sharply criticized the film over the years for failing to capture the novel’s thematic underpinnings. This extends not only to the opera’s visuals—the book’s croquet mallet is used instead of the film’s ax attacks—but also to the music. Moravec had to work hard to compose a unique new score, distinct from previous adaptations, while also incorporating Campbell’s libretto, which draws directly from the book’s American vernacular. The line delivery would almost be conversational rather than musical if not for the demands of operatic projection.
Unlike many classic operas, which traditionally cast adult performers in child roles, this production casts child actor Flash Inouye as Danny Torrance. Vocally, Inouye’s role is a simpler spoken-word part, but he lends an age-appropriate energy that an adult performer would likely not have replicated. In one early scene in which the Torrances leave the stage in opposite directions, Inouye skips merrily into the shadows, while Robert Wesley Mason’s Jack walks with precise cadence.
Mason captures the essence of a man whose demons—his character’s abusive father among them—warp him from the family man he used to be. One highlight has him running down to the basement, swinging the croquet mallet through the air while the sounds of a party play all around. Rebecca Krynski Cox, meanwhile, does Wendy Torrance justice, with songs from her perspective as she wrestles with loving Jack despite his spells of wrath. She also has small, sweet moments with Danny, reading Treasure Island to him before bed despite Jack’s discouragement. Quinton Gardner, in his first major role at Portland Opera—though he has previously been a chorister for Rusalka in 2023 and Puccini: In Concert in 2024—lends his bass baritone to Dick Hallorann with impact disproportionate to his short stage time; during the final bow, he earned some of the loudest applause and calls of “Bravo!”
The Shining has long been viewed as an allegory for the state of America, and this interpretation enhances the opera’s relevance in 2025. On the outside, the Overlook Hotel is a beautiful place. Inside, it’s bedeviled by past sins that will not die: gun violence, murders of women and children, familial abuse, organized crime. Many of the ghosts symbolizing these ills are men with chalk-white faces and voracious appetites for corruption. They revel in toxifying Jack, swaying him into perpetuating their dark cycles. They sing of an unseen “Manager” who will be displeased if Jack fails, and of their desire to visit their will on Danny as well, breaking his sensitive and caring nature.
King himself would surely appreciate how this adaptation has come to reflect the current administration and the damage it has done to this country’s reputation. But in the end, when there is still metaphorical fallout to clear up, there is also a glimmer of hope to inspire the next generation to build a better world.
SEE IT: The Shining at the Newmark Theater, 1111 SW Broadway, 503-248-4335, portland5.com. 7:30 pm Wednesday and Friday, March 19 and 21; 2 pm Sunday, March 23. Sold out.