Word: melodrama
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...curiosity. Within minutes the pair are rocketed into abiding love. Then the hyperkinetic narrative is suspended for about 20 minutes to accommodate a folksy dance number and a comic song in which the only joke is that a fisherman smells like fish. The action alternates between aimless divertissement and melodrama for an overblown three hours. At the end, the central character -- a petty crook named Billy Bigelow (Hayden) who kills himself rather than face capture by the police -- returns to earth as a prospective angel to save his adolescent daughter from a fate like his own. The girl's only...
These are old-fashioned tales, resurrecting issues like passivity vs. action and honesty vs. self-delusion, and relying on such time-honored devices as unreliable narrators, characters who turn out to be angels in disguise, and good old melodrama. Echoes of past masters -- Henry James and John O'Hara, for instance -- abound. What saves the stories from seeming contrived is their natural assurance of voice (the sentences read as if spoken aloud), their steadiness of moral compass and their acuity -- often humorous -- of detail...
During the first few weeks of every school year, hundreds of Harvard students become begrudging participants in a curious melodrama...
...Yankees is Abbott's 125th career production as writer, director, producer or actor. Erstwhile protege Harold Prince, 66, whose first big shows as a producer were Abbott's Pajama Game and the original Yankees, wasn't yet born when Abbott burst to writing fame in 1925 with the melodrama Broadway and the comedy Three Men on a Horse. (Both have been revived on Broadway in recent years, the former in a staging by Abbott himself.) Prince recalls asking Abbott a couple of years ago what became of a play he was writing: "He told me it wasn't working...
OLYMPICS: The End of the Melodrama...