Word: melodrama
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...performance approaching credibility. By removing The Duchess of Malfi from a gossip-ridden palace and situating it in the dark recesses of the mind, Shiels and Raymond have made the tragedy more ghastly, the villains more sinister, but both less convincing. The directors have reduced Webster's tragedy to melodrama--enjoyable, fast-paced but cardboard. A tragedy should make us suffer vicariously, if only for an instant. We don't suffer for an instant at Quincy House's Duchess of Malfi: it's difficult to sympathize with someone else's nightmare...
...economy, and it seems that a new Civil War might break out. Since the story's underpinnings are so weak, the strain on credulity borders on the ridiculous. It is as if an I Love Lucy episode about a lost purse suddenly turned into an overheated melodrama about the stock market crash...
...milkman once told me, the cream comes to the top. Philadelphia has been playing way over its head all season, but now that it's a playoff time the. Flyers will fade away like the end of a Hollywood melodrama. Meanwhile, Montreal will calmly skate into the picture and win the cup. Calm, experienced, and with more two-way players than any other team in hockey, the Habs will ride a hot streak from underrated netminder Denis Herron past Buffalo...
...Sellars' production fails because it attempts too much, his ambition exceeds his grasp. Far from letting the play breathe, he beats it about the neck with a crowbar, adding abrasions and welts until he obscures his own intentions. By any interpretation, Lear should not be an interminable, mired melodrama set in a tempest of technology. Sellars' Lear is a tragedy of excess...
...making Cruising, William Friedkin was asking for trouble. This detective melodrama has something to offend almost everyone: the plot concerns a string of sex murders, and the main setting is Manhattan's unsavory demimonde of sadomasochistic homosexual bars. Last summer, gay activists picketed Cruising's locations, charging that the film would stir anti-gay violence. Two weeks ago, a big theater chain threatened to cancel Cruising 's bookings on the grounds that the film merited an X rather than its official R rating. When the movie opens nationwide this week, more protests may follow. Certainly Cruising will...