Word: melodrama
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...marriage. But it turns out that the drift into separation is neither more nor less uncomfortable to endure than the tuggings and haulings of an old marriage. It does, at least, give everyone a new set of problems to think about, and the novelty is welcome. Josepha lacks the melodrama of many of the recent films about divorce, but that adds to its truthfulness. It is also well played by all three members of its likable triangle (Miou-Miou, Claude Brasseur, Bruno Cremer), and it is full of small, smart observations about men, women, life and the theatrical calling. Best...
Only imagination is needed, and a concentration of spirit, to make Ibsen's great dramas burst into bright flame. This brushfire production, imported to Broadway from Washington's Kennedy Center, dampens the spirit of the text and absolutely extinguishes its immediacy. Burnt down to basic melodrama, Ghosts creaks like a mediocre television serial. Its terrible symmetry has here all the impact of a bad night at Falcon Crest...
...round out the hour on PBS after episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs. Yet with the passion of theater people for unearthing every oddment of stage history, an off-Broadway team has assembled Charlotte Sweet, an ingratiating pastiche that re-creates typical music hall turns and simultaneously concocts a conventional Victorian melodrama among the members of a particularly nutty touring troupe...
...turbid decade-about wars, revolutions, anything more dramatic than a lunar hemline? There were, but few seem interested in them now. The frenetic world of '60s sex and drugs makes for a kickier nightmare than Viet Nam or Watts or Kent State. It offers an escape into Hollywood melodrama, but with the frisson of real names and familiar faces. How else to explain the post-mortem celebrity of Edie Sedgwick? Once a footnote in any pop history of the decade, she is now the summer's hot number. Edie (Knopf; $16.95), a 450-page biography...
...star of this Mylar melodrama had her own seductive pathology, much of which came from her bloodlines. A bizarre brood, the Sedgwicks. Their money was so "old" it just seemed to grow wild, like weeds on a lawn, or like the manic-depressive strain that led to suicide for several members of the clan. Uncle Minturn, who kept watch over the Sedgwick gravesite in Stockbridge, Mass., insisted on cheap pine coffins for the family and would lie inside them to test their fit. Edie's father Francis, a golden boy at Harvard in the 1920s who turned to sculpting...