Taking inspiration from a dark, debt-collecting figure from Spanish history and a Carl Jung archetype based around the desires locked in our unconscious mind, The Shadow is lighter fare than it may first appear. A clever mix of comic opera and high melodrama, this humorous and heightened world premiere seems designed to be enjoyed by opera aficionados and lay-folk alike.

Following Raoul, a middling mailman from old Barcelona who — through his desperate love for a rich man’s bored (and boringly stereotyped) daughter Allegra and his desire to rise above his station — transforms himself into Hernando, a swarthy, romantic anti-hero. Seeking to woo and wed his amore, he quickly gets into trouble when he borrows money from a powerful Don in order to keep her. From this, then, we have our shadows. One is Hernando, the external expression of Raoul’s repressed inner aspirations; the other is the dapper debt-collector, a handsome, demon-esque figure who seeks to publicly humiliate Raoul into paying what is due.

Musically, The Shadow uses its violin and cello-driven sound as much as an expression of mood as it does an articulation of melody. While composer Omar Daniel's tunes come off stronger than Alex Poch-Goldin's text, the major drawback in the score is its overuse of discordant music. Indeed, the unpleasantness of Raoul’s plight is so heavily reflected throughout that the effect is outweighed by the irritation in our ears. Still, creativity abounds, and the use of a sack of coins to underscore a song about the relationship between power and money is subtle but substantial.

Without a doubt, the best moments arise from the restaurant scene in which the bravado of newly unleashed Hernando matches crisply with the beating music and director Tom Diamond’s almost vaudevillian dinner service — one that utilizes real food and drink on stage to great effect and ends in a dramatic dine-and-dash. The vibrancy of this sequence, however, is unfortunately never again matched and thus the remainder feels sort of like a denouement triggered before its time. Peter McGillivray delivers as Raoul, being as haughty or harried as needed, but it is the wonderfully self-aware turn by Keith Klassen — as the simple waiter — who steals the show, walking that fine line between audience engagement and onstage plot progression.  

In all, The Shadow unfolds as a sort of light moral lesson, to remind us that greed is bad, even if justified by love. That these shadows sent to stalk still-outstanding debtors exist even today in modern day Spain is perhaps a reflection of the theatrically of life here on Earth — or it might be a reflection of our own inner desires to make others suffer for their slip-ups. That’s the thing about shadows, though — they’re hard to get to know unless you shine light on them but, by that time, they’re already gone.