Word: melodrama
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Move over PBS. MTV is taking over in at least one Harvard classroom. Students taking Royston Coppenger's course, "Popular Entertainment: From Melodrama to Rock and Roll," will spend classtime watching film and video screenings of popular works...
Unaccustomed to such a hands-on director, the actors at Cleveland's Great Lakes Theater Festival were perplexed at first, afraid that the boss might stifle their creativity. "I should have heard those lines, and I didn't," was his constant complaint during rehearsals of Broadway, a melodrama he had first directed in 1926. But then they remembered the name behind that stern voice. "Hey," said one young actor, "this is George Abbott! We know it's going to work...
...humankind." The nephew feels his uncle has single-mindedly pursued such a path and might be an appropriate guide: "I thought, Would it be possible to bring to the human world what Uncle brought to plant life?" Unfortunately, this "crucial project" is interrupted by a bit of mundane melodrama. After 15 years as a widower, Benn marries the young, beautiful Matilda Layamon, only child of a wealthy, well-connected physician...
Outwardly, Road is an issue melodrama about an old woman no longer able to take care of herself. To the outrage of a visiting younger friend, her pastor wants to move her into an old-age home -- and, not incidentally, thereby make her give up the backyard Mecca of Magi, camels, owls and other mystical sculptures she has built from cement, rusting wire, ground-up glass bottles and found objects. Her house is a shrine to her, an eyesore to neighbors, a mark of witchcraft to children and an affront both personal and theological to the pastor and his church...
With the pastiche ideology of post-modernism the theater has lost the appetite for the strong emotions and extravagant gestures that once were associated with the word "dramatic." Somehow, a cheesy melodrama like Dietrich's Dishonoured or Bogart's Maltese Falcon seems truer to the human heart than any new work I've seen on a stage in years. The theater, always a comfortable haven for dry intellectuals, may well have hypertrophied to the point that it is just an expensive substitute for The David Letterman Show...