Word: melodrama
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Awake and Sing, his first full-length play, is a leftist, Jewish melodrama, something that Chekhov would have written if he had grown up in the Bronx and been named Blumberg. It treads on ground that we seen many times before: the Berger apartment on the Grand Concourse looks just like Neil Simon's place in Brighton Beach, Woody Allen's old home under the roller coaster at Coney Island, and even Alexander Portnoy's house of horrors in Newark. But this is not nostalgia; the fuzzy sentimentalism of memory is replaced here with a genuine anger, and even...
...neurotically generous. She is neurotically needy. We all know about people like Betty Blue: in movies, though not necessarily in life, they come to a bad end. Indeed, much of the suspense in this high-fevered melodrama revolves around whether that end will arrive sooner or later, and just how painful it will...
...White House reception for all the members of Congress and their spouses is scheduled, and the plans now call for the biggest and grandest such event of the Reagan era. The bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution is being heavily cranked into the Reagan activities, and that sort of melodrama is what he relishes and does best. It is a reminder to everyone, including Reagan, that we are all in this thing together...
Corazon Aquino's first, ever so hesitant entry into the larger-than-life melodrama of recent Philippine history came when Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972. One of the first people to be arrested without charge was Ninoy Aquino, Marcos' closest rival. The tough but charismatic Aquino had in quick succession become the youngest mayor in Philippine history (at 22), the youngest governor (at 29) and the youngest Senator (at 34). He seemed likely to become the youngest President too, as soon as Marcos' second and final term ended in 1973. Before that could happen, Marcos threw...
...corner of a motel room, a not very subtle melodrama unfolded. As a fat bailiff and a sinister, black-hatted attorney looked on, a man in tattered wig and skirt, playing the role of Mary, Mary Workman, demanded custody of "her" child. Judge Hardly D. Fairman leered and laughed as devoted but helpless Father Adam Workman looked on, awaiting the worst...