Word: melodrama
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...Melodrama of love and death...
...most important difference, however, is one of tone. The old play was written as a straight melodrama, with everything to be taken relatively seriously. But Hall and Richmond have intentionally laced their play with lots of funny lines; and one remark in the third act rightly puts the audience into an uproar...
...each show, Springsteen will drop to one knee in front of the mike and yell with the sort of mock melodrama that cloaks an almost literal truth, "I'm just a prisoner . . . of rock 'n' roll!" In the audience, his fellow lifers laugh and cheer, delirious inmates in the same cell. Of all those prisoners, though, only the Boss holds...
...UNTIL THE '30's did American theater begin to come into its own, freed from the trappings of burlesque and tinny melodrama by a rising generation of playwrights with something to say about America, not just about the commonplace, tired excuses for dramatic themes that until then were the bulk of theater in this country. The best, or at least the most successful, of that generation of writers was Maxwell Anderson, whose Winterset (1935) is currently in performance at the Loeb. Anderson tried to work modern themes into the dramatic contexts of his plays without overwhelming the drama...
...years ago when Queen Elizabeth's sister, Princess Margaret, wound up British royalty's longest romantic melodrama since the days of Edward VIII and Wallis ("the woman I love") Simpson by dropping her hopes of marrying Group Captain Peter Townsend. For all of his qualifications as a royal spouse, the dashing Battle of Britain hero had that fatal divorce in his background. So Britons were doubly cheered when, five years later at 29, the willful Meg finally made it to the altar, this time with Antony Armstrong-Jones, the arty son of a Welsh barrister and a promising...