The composer Paul Moravec told local NPR radio personality Lois Reitzes that music intensifies feelings: scary is more scary, tenderness is more tender. I found that to be true. There's the expected ominous foreboding, but also warmth, a lullabye, and painful husband-wife dialogue. When the story startles us, the music enhances the effect.
With the librettist Mark Campbell, Moravec also compresses huge swaths of Stephen King's novel into memorable moments onstage, using the magic of music to unfold two or more scenes at one time. While hotel employee Dick Hallorann tours the hotel with the mother Wendy and her 11-year-old son Danny, Danny's father Jack Torrance is on the other side of the stage, being confronted by his employer: incidents have come to light that Jack hadn't reported, especially alcohol abuse and his dismissal from a teaching position for hitting a student. While Jack protests that he's okay and everything will be all right, Wendy tries to reassure Danny and herself that everything will be all right.
During this same pair of scenes, we learn two other pieces of consequential information. A flash of light and a musical flourish alert the audience of a special connection between Mr. Hallorann and little Danny, a telepathic communication that Hallorann calls "the shining." If the time comes that Danny needs help, Hallorann promises that he'll hear the call and come as fast as he can. Meanwhile, Jack learns that a previous caretaker went berserk, killed his family and himself. Jack is determined to prove that he is a good provider, a strong protector, a man who doesn't need help. This armor of masculine independence will be a barrier between Jack and Wendy when she sees signs of trouble.
The ghostly inhabitants of the hotel lurk as a chorus that we hear even when we cannot see them, a powerful tool for Moravec and Campbell to show Jack's absorption into their culture of desperate hedonism. The live-action singers are reinforced by eerie animated projections of blurred, glowing versions of themselves. Three men in the group emerge to act like fraternity brothers to initiate Jack into their practices -- chief of which seems to be making "corrections" when a wife or child challenges the head of the family.
Moravec and Campbell integrate dozens of pages of backstory by simply bringing Jack's abusive father in to expand that trio to a quartet of ghosts for an infernal big band number. Does he belong there, who had no connection to the hotel in life? He belongs, if we see the ghosts as manifestations of Jack's own inner demons. The ghosts are real enough to Danny. At one riveting moment, he screams to his mother, "They've got him!" Who? "The people in the hotel!" It's easy to see the hotel as one outpost of a hell that contains more than the whackos who lived there. And we don't need supernatural scaffolding to understand how abuse Jack suffered as a boy left a reservoir of anger that will swamp little Danny when the dam breaks.
Supernatural influence, or the eruption of purely personal evil? The Shining, like a classic that shares many of its features, The Turn of the Screw, is creepy both ways. [That made a good opera, too. See my review of 04/2013]
Because music can imprint a memory through melody, Jack's sincere promise to Danny to love and protect him always rises to prominence from a swirl of music, upping the impact of a fatal decision.
Having now seen the movie, read the book, and heard the opera, I can attest that the single most emotional moment of the story, whatever the form, is as strong here as ever, so strong that I wept during intermission. That's a good thing for an opera.
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