Word: melodrama
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...where did all of this desperation come from? New York, you say? Good answer, but desperation goes too far back and strays too far afield from New York. For all its Newest Wave, mod feel, Susan traces its anxious female motif back to the gangster melodrama films of the 30's, with one twist. Like the vapid blonds in film noir, our housewife seeks her thrills in a more happening world, but there the comparison must end. Her idol is not a man, but Susan; her goal not to grab her idol's pants, but to wear them...
...Hauptman's book also sustains Twain's deeper exploration of how a society could view slavery as normal and regard assisting a runaway as a crime against property. The story starts slowly and wobbles in tone, but achieves the original's deft mix of social comment, slapstick farce, heartrending melodrama and boy's own tale of danger. Big River, which started in regional theaters and seems likely to become a standard there, deserves its place on Broadway. It is gentle, thoughtful, slightly old-fashioned and much cleaner than the back of Huckleberry's perennially unwashed neck...
...OTHER THREE characters behave more predictably that even Segal probably would like, with melodrama dominating. Danny's life much the way respectability comes to define. Andrew's George the made Hungarian, "applies his passion for power and government to his studies which--almost inevitably, it seems--wind up under the auspices of Henry Kissinger 50 People take drugs, marriages crumble children rebel, in these lives must the way they do in non Harvard ones it's just that here they all have class years after their names...
...fewer continuities. Of six full-length shows and six one-acts, three were Southern gothics, two more were raucous absurdist fantasies, three others dealt with diseases and hospitals, two depicted the betrayal of noble people by political movements they had served loyally, one was a heartfelt if muddled historical melodrama, and the last was a conventional two-character problem drama about a marriage. Although the scripts varied in diction and temperament, fully half were in essence realistic, and all but two were set in current or recent America. None could be categorized as truly avant-garde. This artistically conservative nature...
...popular nighttime soap opera, Dynasty, ended last week's episode with typical edge-of-the-seat melodrama. In a scuffle aboard a private plane, Blake Carrington and Daniel Reece (John Forsythe and Rock Hudson) accidentally knocked the pilot unconscious, sending their craft hurtling toward the ; mountains below. Their fate, in the manner of TV cliffhangers, rested in the hands of the network...