Word: melodrama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...melodrama in the play seems less high-flown when you have the melodrama of the author's own life and background to refer to. When you know that Hellman had an elegant aunt who was actually a morphine addict and the lover of her black chauffeur, who so resented the large loans she had made to her husband--the one who was having an affair with a Cajun girl--that she would never communicate with him except through the medium of her son Honey (a slightly off-beat character himself, who tried to rape Hellman when she was fourteen...
...miserable attempt to impress the self-consciously cultured Marcus Hubbard (she tells him that her uncle taught her to love Mozart, but in answer to a question reveals that the instrument he played on was a little drum"), but her irrepressible earthiness finally leads her to puncture the melodrama directly. Indignant at the way Marcus is treating Oscar, she tells him off the way no other character would dare to: "A Papa talking about his own son! No animal would talk about their own son that way... You old bastard...
...when Laurette is not on stage giving the audience its cue to laugh at all this--which is most of the time--the humor tends to get lost in the melodrama. It isn't fair to blame the actors or the production entirely for what is, at least in Hellman's eyes, the failure of the play. The play is intended to be uneven, in the sense that it veers from comedy to tragedy, and it is often difficult for both the audience and the actors to keep up with it. As far as the acting, it calls for deft...
...pact with the dead to win a for tune. The singing on the first night (again Atlantov, Mazurok and Milash-kina) was excellent, but here, as on sev eral other occasions, the real stars were Conductor Yuri Simonov, 34, and his powerhouse orchestra, who seize upon each moment of melodrama. "Whatever is written in the score should be heard," says Simonov, echoing his idol, the late Arturo Toscanini. That goes for voices too. Simonov has a knack, for allowing key vocal phrases to come through, while keeping the orchestra down but precisely audible. This Pique Dame pro duction...
...lasted less than three weeks before local critics turned off the lights. "Dreadful," snipped the Boston Globe of Williams' first drama since Outcry in 1973, "a flickering shadow of his former self." The Boston Herald American said the play "teeters and totters eerily between true tragedy and mawkish melodrama." Complaining that "one of the great talents of all time has been treated like an assembly-line butcher," the newly unemployed Quinn snapped: "Just say that I am more proud of being in a failure by Tennessee Williams than in a hit by a shit...