Word: melodrama
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...gentlewoman whose refusal to marry according to her father's wishes plunges her into a tangle of murder and deceit. It's not a deep play, and except for a few climactic moments the poetry isn't particularly inspired. But it is a thrilling blood-and-thunder melodrama. The Leverett House production succeeds when director Wendy Smith and the actors swallow their doubts and accept this fact, playing some of the gruesome scenes in a high-serious stage manner that would be hard to believe if it weren't so gripping...
...World According to Garp is a long family novel, spanning four generations and two continents, crammed with incidents, characters, feelings and craft. The components of black comedy and melodrama, pathos and tragedy, mesh effortlessly in a tale that can also be read as a commentary on art and the imagination...
...Holocaust is necessarily rooted in the conventions of melodrama, it is sophisticated in its approach to the history it covers; Green does not miss too many angles. He dramatizes the special anti-Semitic character of Hitler's policies, but also shows that many non-Jews were victims of German genocide. He depicts those Jews who went quietly to the slaughter as well as those who tried to resist. He reminds the audience that a few Jews even curried favor with their German captors and that the Allied powers (the U.S. included) stood idly by as evidence of the Holocaust...
...turn this fine acting into a movie. Watching Madame Rosa is like spending an interesting couple of hours at an actors' workshop on an afternoon when everyone is noodling with death scenes. One reason the film lacks conviction is that the script is loaded with melodrama. Rosa is not simply a dear old party, she is made to be a survivor of Auschwitz, an agnos tic Jew who clings to the ceremonies of her religion in a basement shrine. Momo is not just an abandoned child; he is the son (as one of the film's stagier scenes...
...major weakness of the production, however, lies in the directors' apparent inability to decide whether to play up or defuse the melodrama written into Ten Little Indians. Even allowing for what seemed to be a fairly lighthearted audience, the amount of laughter punctuating some of the most serious scenes makes for lags in suspense that mar an otherwise fine production. The laughter may in part be attributed to an outdated play, but the responsibility for staging the play's ending obviously belongs to the directors, and that ending falls very flat. It is simply too long and too overacted. Because...