There's a Whole Lot of Horror in CCT's World Premiere "Shining in Misery"
Photo by Kat Stiennon.
Stephen King’s horror stories are filled with indelible characters, supernatural atrocities, and mysterious locales — from haunted houses and possessed cars, to unholy cemeteries and spooky corn fields. The author is so good at scaring the bejesus out of his audience that King’s books have inspired adaptations for decades.
But while many of the prolific novelist’s titles have become blockbuster movies, forays into theater with King’s material have, historically, been less well received. (The 1988 Broadway musical Carrie is one of the industry’s most infamous flops, closing after only five performances and losing millions of dollars.) And yet, fans of King’s terrifying oeuvre continue to use his gory stories of suspense to create theatrical pieces. Celebrated Belgian director Ivo van Hove is currently working on a stage adaptation of King’s classic The Shining, which will premiere later this year on the West End. And last fall, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre mounted a terrific production of Misery, the story of an author who is imprisoned, terrorized, and tortured by his biggest fan.
Taking a slightly different stab at the murderous material here in Madison, Capital City Theatre opened Shining in Misery on Feb. 23, a new musical parody of the all things Stephen King. Continuing through March 5 in the Playhouse at Overture Center, the production is part of the World Premiere Wisconsin theater festival. Featuring music by CCT artistic director Andrew Abrams and book and lyrics by Colleen DuVall and Mark-Eugene Garcia, Shining in Misery is a mash-up of the two titular Stephen King stories (with references to many, many more) along with characters and songs borrowed from contemporary musical theater.
Unfortunately, an exceptionally strong cast can’t save this monster from itself. With a diffuse plot that does little more than name check a long list of titles from both Stephen King and Broadway, an insider-y appeal that only really lands with superfans, and a book that relies more on gratuitous dick jokes than cleverness, Shining in Misery is an overly long evening overstuffed with tangential songs that never really gels.
When the lights come up, we meet a family traveling to the super creepy Overlook Hotel in a snowstorm. Mom Wendy (Madeline Glenn Thomas), Dad Jack (Jonathan Wagner) and son Danny (Benji Heying) are accompanied by their nanny, Annie (Gail Becker) who, we find out later, started her life as a red-headed little orphan with a musical of her own. Along the way, they pick up Paul (Cody Gerszewski), a badly injured author who has been in a car accident on this wintery night. Once they arrive at the haunted hotel, a group of ghouls appear to greet them along with two very friendly pets — a cute and cuddly dog named Cujo (Erin McConnell) and a small black cat with at least nine lives. Mayhem ensues as Annie and Jack discover their sadistic sides, little Danny’s hand is possessed by the deranged spirit of his dead brother, and the spirits are on a mission to scare the hotel’s new residents to death. In between attempts at “redrum,” the company breaks into song, accompanied by impressive dance numbers by director and choreographer Donald Garverick.
On opening night Abrams asked the audience to raise their hands if they were hard-core members of the Stephen King fanclub. Roughly a third of the audience whooped loudly. They were also the ones erupting in raucous laughter throughout the night, as they recognized Easter eggs that left the rest of the crowd silent and possibly confused. As an avid musical theater fan, I was hoping that the Broadway element of this mega mash-up would be equally entertaining, but the references to Annie, Les Misérables, Hamilton, Rocky Horror, Tick, Tick… Boom, Rent and Jesus Christ Superstar were even more of a distraction than sorting out all the King characters, including those from non-horror titles, like Andy Dufresne from The Shawshank Redemption.
What makes the show eminently watchable is the performers, whose expert singing voices effortlessly fill the auditorium. As the protagonist in Misery-land, Alex Gossard is a charming sadsack as the besieged novelist who can’t escape the grip of his crazed nurse. A gag with his misbehaving foot is one of the only truly funny things in the show. Gossard adroitly pivots between a murderous clown and an escaped prison inmate with a heart of gold, and even fits in a spot-on Frank-N-Furter cameo. These gentlemen are both upstaged by Jason Williams as a magical ghost doing a soft-shoe and later, as a bartender with an agenda.
Meanwhile in Shining-world, Wagner is the equally terrifying and charismatic, neurotic writer Jack, who is losing his grip on reality. Stopping just short of caricature, he looks and sounds like Jack Black doing a Jack Nicholson impression, which is also amusing. His wife, Wendy, is played by Thomas with the sweet, clear singing voice of a Disney princess. She also mirrors her Shining movie counterpart Shelley Duvall with the help of an ever-present cigarette and a black wig. Cast as the only sane and sympathetic character in the musical, Wendy has the most convincing throughline, with songs about her unhappy marriage to a man whose temperament doesn’t match hers, and her eventual resolve to be the author of her own story.
Rounding out the family, Heying does a terrific job channeling a terrified six year-old who is being overtaken by another personality and sees murderous ghosts in every room. His brain nearly explodes at the top of act two, when he is confronted with the infamous twin girl ghosts (Thomas and McConnell) singing a very cute but menacing song about seeing double.
Shining in Misery is also buoyed by excellent production values. Kevin Gawley’s multi-level set looks like a cutaway haunted house filled with perils — complete with the iconic hotel elevator, a creepy cellar with a glowing boiler, a plethora of doors and windows for ghouls to lurk in, and bedrooms that appear and disappear. Costume designer Karen Brown-Larimore gives the cast many top-notch costumes for their many characters, all presumably very easy to get in and out of, to accommodate quick changes. There are also wigs aplenty to make the transformations complete.
But as King fans would acknowledge, the key to a great story is the writing and by the second act, the thinly constructed horror farce has nowhere to go. Shining in Misery devolves into a long chase scene and eventually an overly meta, Scooby-Doo ending. It’s a long drive back to reality, for those few characters who survive. I wish there were more earned laughs along the way.