Word: melodrama
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THEATER Broadway stars can't save a trite melodrama...
...Hill's Phantom of the Opera. First produced in England in 1976, this comic melodrama had a book by Hill and a score by Ian Armit. In 1984 Hill dropped the original music and wrote new lyrics to arias by Gounod, Offenbach, Verdi, Mozart and Donizetti. Lloyd Webber considered producing an embellished version of it, then decided to do his own. Thank heavens. Hill's backstage farce is a kind of Noises Off without the wit, and the cast plays it as hammy gaslight farce -- a penny dreadful that at today's prices plays like a $32.50 dreadful. It alights...
...opera that inspired cultural apocalypses comes to Harvard. The Dunster House Opera Society's Carmen made an ambitious attempt to portray all of the historic and romantic melodrama of Bizet's sole masterpiece, but it fell just short of the mark. Despite memorable aria performances and excellent lighting, the passion so requisite to a good production was not there...
...will go off. The original's ending was misanthropic, claustrophobic -- a fellow in a tight spot with no way out but death. Graff provides a rousingly standard climax, putting the heroine at mortal risk in an old dark house and then letting her triumph. It makes for sturdy melodrama, old-style. You've seen it work a million times. Well, it works again...
Queen eventually triumphs, of course, thanks to her pluck and the love of a good man (Danny Glover). All of which would be more inspiring if it weren't for the florid melodrama and tinhorn dialogue. The villainous racists do everything but twirl their mustaches. The shallow plantation wives are cliches of another sort: "If it were not for the slave girls," says one, excusing the menfolk's sexual dalliances, "we women would have to submit to our husbands whenever they feel . . . healthy." The young Queen expresses her romantic outlook in sappy lines like "I want to marry a prince...