Word: melodrama
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When she took the stand in her own defense last week-at various times contrite, teary, arrogant and bewildered-Harris brought near a climax a two-month courtroom drama that has combined the dime-store romantics of a Barbara Cartland novel with the sizzling melodrama of a Perry Mason episode. The trial has produced steamy headlines across the country and attracted the toniest of courtroom spectators, at least five of whom are writing books on the case. "I feel Mrs. Harris' behavior on the witness stand is outrageous," said one of them. "She sits there outsmarting everyone, trying...
Because the lead actors refuse to spark against each other, East of Eden fails as human drama and even as entertaining melodrama. With any stars, the show was unlikely to have ranked with the best prime-time soaps. With callow Tim and sallow Sam, East of Eden is doomed to scrape Bottoms. -By Richard Corliss
...Marine Band playing Hail to the Chief, and minutes later a plane half a world away finally lifts off from a Tehran runway, thus ending an ordeal that has sapped the nation's confidence for 444 agonizing days. Hollywood would not have touched such an improbable melodrama, but so it happened last week, and Ronald Wilson Reagan was the leading...
Other composers have turned turgid melodrama into art--Puccini exhumed Belasco creakers to create Madama Butterfly and La Fanciulla Del West--but Sondheim's score achieves little distinction. It flounders in a pool of notes instead of gushing with passion. Only the lushness of "Pretty Woman," the dissonance of "Epiphany," and the insouciance of "A Little Priest" salvage the first act from musical banality. Even here, the Metropolitan Center's gully of an orchestra pit prevents Sweeney's blazing razor attack from terrorizing even the first...
...Here she assumes her customary tone of moral outrage, but the hero, a deceased Greek revolutionary, is as unpromising in death as he was thwarted in life. The owlish collector of excesses is soon faced with an embarrassment of riches-and sometimes just with an embarrassment. For connoisseurs of melodrama there is the first meeting of narrator and martyr: "You were to have many faces, many names ... you were a Vietcong girl... You told me about a god with a yellow beard whom they call Jesus Christ and he has wings and flies over the clouds and dies like...