Hatchet Job: KC’s official cast recording appoints us winter caretakers of The Shining Opera

Photo by Ken Howard

Last year, Kansas City got a chance to witness the spectacle and scale of a new opera, based on Stephen King’s novel The Shining. Sharing a title with the book, the show adapts directly from the 1977 horror novel, pulling narratives and character arcs that divert (at points sharply) from the 1980 Kubrick film.

While English language operas—and modern operas in general—have a difficult time finding footing with the medium’s traditional audience, this sprawling, epic tale of tortured psychological trauma and addiction/abuse cycles made a horrifying debut on stage at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.

Photo by Ken Howard

For those in attendance last year for the limited run of three shows, there was a surprise waiting right at the start of the show: an announcement that these performances were being recorded. Yes, the KC show was captured to serve as the official, original, worldwide debut cast recording of the opera—which had seen several productions since 2016.

Debut cast recordings of a show are, obviously, a huge deal. Most musicals and operas will only get one official release, and Paul Moravec and Mark Campbell’s opera The Shining this will forever belong to a performance (and audience) in KC. We’ve yet to track down any other musical or opera to have its original cast recording captured in this region—making this release an impressive feather in our city’s cap on the international arts stage. Even for those who have never seen an opera, this is the kind of thing we should all have a chance to feel civic pride around.

Photo by Ken Howard

Also marking the singular nature of this release, it’s wild to hear a full show recording for a new work taken from a live recording. Everything that made this final release was taken from the stage at Kauffman. The opening seconds of the album include the sound of a car’s engine chugging along, as the family vehicle on stage pulls up to the Overlook Hotel. It’s almost distractingly outside of the box to have a show documented with all the sound effects and a live audience included, especially in the opera space. But again: this all serves to further cement this record’s place in KC history.

Deborah Sandler Kemper (General Director of the Lyric Opera) explains that one of the best recording teams in the biz was brought in to handle things, but that the audience did require some coaxing to take a chance on this. “I don’t watch sicko movies,” she says, of having never seen the Kubrick film, and taking some shit from her kids over it. “I don’t like the way Jack Nicholson looks in that. No thank you. But the opera regulars who came out to take a chance on this really seemed to understand exactly what this was going for, with unyielding foreboding instead of blood and guts.”

Photo by Ken Howard

The all-star cast included Edward Parks and Kelly Kaduce. Making his Lyric Opera of Kansas City debut, Gerard Schwarz, the internationally renowned (14 Grammy Awards and eight Emmy Awards) American conductor, conducted the Kansas City Symphony. Baritones Aubrey Allicock and Malcolm MacKenzie, and tenor Roger Honeywell also made their Lyric Opera debuts.

The digital recording is available for streaming on all the usual outlets, but we recommend the physical copies in an elaborately designed clamshell with bonus content. You can track those down at the Kauffman Center Box Office.