Smodcastle Checks Into the Overlook for The Shining: Live on Stage

On Friday, Oct. 9, the Atlantic Highlands filmhouse will hand the screen-side experience over to Raconteur Radio for The Shining: Live on Stage!, a live radio-drama parody built around performance, illuminated scripts, theatrical lighting, costumes, music and extensive sound effects rather than another trip through Stanley Kubrick's film frame by frame.

The 8 p.m. performance brings Alex Dawson and company back to Smodcastle after earlier live-stage versions of Die Hard and Jaws. Jeff Maschi plays Jack Torrance, Danielle Illario plays Wendy Torrance, and Carlyle Owens takes on hotel cook Dick Hallorann along with assorted other characters. Then there is Danny: Kevin Smith is playing the child at the center of the Overlook's supernatural trouble, along with Tony, the tiny voice that lives in Danny's mouth. The joke is already functioning before the first line is read.

General admission is $25, and Smodcastle does not use assigned seating for the event, so the theater is explicitly encouraging people to arrive early. That practical detail also suits this kind of show. Radio drama works through collective attention: voices, effects and timing build the room in the audience's head, and being physically together is part of the mechanism. The movie gives everyone the same hallway. Live performance asks the crowd to help imagine it.

A movie everyone knows, taken apart in public

Raconteur Radio's format is not traditional theater and not simply a staged reading. Dawson describes the troupe's work as radio-drama parodies of familiar blockbusters, with actors reading from illuminated scripts while sound, music, costumes and performance supply enough physical information for the audience to complete the picture. That makes The Shining unusually well suited to the treatment. So much of its tension is sonic: footsteps, silence, music, doors, voices and the sense that a building is listening back.

Dawson has been working in this form for years, staging versions of pop-culture films and classic stories throughout New Jersey. A 2026 profile in New Jersey Stage described his long collaboration with Maschi and noted that Maschi's Jack Torrance is one of Dawson's favorite performances from the troupe's history. The Smodcastle relationship has become a natural extension of that work because the venue can function as both movie house and live-performance room without pretending those identities need to be separate.

That hybrid is the interesting part of the advance. Most repertory events ask an audience to return to a familiar movie exactly as it exists. This one asks what remains recognizable after the image is removed. The answer is apparently enough of The Shining to fill a theater, frighten it, make it laugh and still leave room for Kevin Smith to be a small psychic child.

The night has its own Gold Room

The event also adds a few pieces around the central performance. Will Rogers of the horror-comedy podcast Guide to the Unknown will provide a special introduction. Illario, who is also a jazz vocalist, is scheduled to perform Al Bowlly's 'Midnight, the Stars & You,' the song associated with the Gold Room sequence in Kubrick's film. Those touches give the evening the shape of an event rather than a single staged piece.

Smodcastle lists the production at 90 minutes and notes that Raconteur Radio already brought Die Hard and Jaws to the cinema, with Gremlins also on the upcoming slate. That pattern is starting to become its own small programming lane: beloved movies entering the building one way and coming back out as live theater.

The Shining has spent decades being discussed as a film of composition, architecture and controlled imagery. A radio-stage parody deliberately removes much of that control. A live actor can miss a beat. A sound cue can land differently because the crowd is laughing. A familiar line can become funny for reasons the movie never intended. The audience knows where the story is going, but the route gets unstable again.

That is what makes the Oct. 9 night worth watching beyond the novelty of the casting. Smodcastle is taking a story most people know as an immovable cinematic object and putting human timing back inside it. The Overlook is supposed to make people lose their grip on reality. For one night in Atlantic Highlands, it will also have to survive live theater.

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• Smodcastle Cinemas — The Shining: Live on Stage!