Word: melodrama
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...three works new to U.S. audiences: Ashton's Rhapsody, a glittering display originally created for Mikhail Baryshnikov; MacMillan's Gloria, a dark ode to the generation killed in the Great War, set to the bright strains of Poulenc; and Isadora, also by MacMillan, a tasteless, breast-baring melodrama about Modern Dance Pioneer Isadora Duncan, with a pastiche score by Richard Rodney Bennett. In addition, the Royal performed, for the first time in New York City, MacMillan's La Fin du Jour, a febrile evocation of the vanished world of the Bright Young Things...
...policemen learn," Wambaugh writes, "life imitates not art but melodrama," and he enlivens his dense tale with vivid examples. His heroes carom off two patrolmen dubbed "street monsters" for their appetite for violence; a Marine posing for gay sculptors; the Ferret and the Weasel, a pair of frenzied narcs; a Vietnamese assassin; Tuna Can Tommy, a flasher with a phenomenal physique; and a massage-parlor hostess called Jackin Jill...
...fought the nation's first teen-age war (average age: 19.2 years) did not cook up that war themselves in a mischievous moment. That was all of America out there. "It was a collective enterprise," says Dr. Egendorf, "and we were all damaged by it. A family melodrama is still going on. Sometimes a psychologist cannot treat the individual alone; he must see the whole family together...
Josephine Baker parlayed that talent into a strange career. As Biographer Lynn Haney recounts, Baker badgered her way onto Broadway when she was 16, but it was in Paris three years later that she found true recognition. As in a '30s melodrama, Baker's professional life roared on while the person behind the spangles was racked with insecurity. The crucial difference between Baker and her Hollywood contemporaries was that the star was black, and consequently was barred from many roles in her native land...
Regina is a role that permits her to be both sex-and bitch-goddess, to range from coquetry to carnage. Since The Little Foxes is an out-and-out melodrama, it relies on manipulated emotions and Taylor need not probe authentic feelings. Like all melodramas, Foxes provides playgoers with the grand fun of mentally hissing villains, crying over victims and cheering on heroes...