Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...awkward lulls between songs and dialogue. Ruddigore further avoids monotony by alternately tingling and tickling the audience's spines. The overture and an early number that re-enacts the original curse freeze the viewer's blood, but as the plot progresses the mood shifts to a more comic melodrama, complete with Dracula-like capes and ominous laughter. The chills resume in force during Act Two's climactic portrait scene, in which the paintings of deceased Murgatroyds literally come alive--a moment that is as visually dazzling as it is technically brilliant...
...gentlewoman whose refusal to marry according to her father's wishes plunges her into a tangle of murder and deceit. It's not a deep play, and except for a few climactic moments the poetry isn't particularly inspired. But it is a thrilling blood-and-thunder melodrama. The Leverett House production succeeds when director Wendy Smith and the actors swallow their doubts and accept this fact, playing some of the gruesome scenes in a high-serious stage manner that would be hard to believe if it weren't so gripping...
...brief and pleasant mixture of drollness and terror. But the two don't mix well, and we inevitably lose come of the shock value of the play's blood if we're too bad everyone working on the show couldn't agree to squeeze out every last drop of melodrama...
...World According to Garp is a long family novel, spanning four generations and two continents, crammed with incidents, characters, feelings and craft. The components of black comedy and melodrama, pathos and tragedy, mesh effortlessly in a tale that can also be read as a commentary on art and the imagination...
...turn this fine acting into a movie. Watching Madame Rosa is like spending an interesting couple of hours at an actors' workshop on an afternoon when everyone is noodling with death scenes. One reason the film lacks conviction is that the script is loaded with melodrama. Rosa is not simply a dear old party, she is made to be a survivor of Auschwitz, an agnos tic Jew who clings to the ceremonies of her religion in a basement shrine. Momo is not just an abandoned child; he is the son (as one of the film's stagier scenes...