Word: melodrama
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...also the customary hugging of childhood dolls, the eerie apartment, the screeching lovers' quarrels. Mercy and Childie have one love scene of unprecedented explicitness, but even that is not let alone. George catches the lovers en flagrante, throwing open the door in the manner of a Joan Crawford melodrama. In the fervent exploration of once-forbidden terrain, film makers are understandably attracted to themes of homosexuality. Still, treating lesbians as if they were only men in skirts is like treating children as if they were only small adults. Both attitudes are false to facts and dishonest to drama...
...orchestra was performed. In this work Schoenberg strikes a medium between lyric singing and his own device of sprechstimme, by setting his expressionist text to notes of various vertical distances above and below a reference line. The work, described as "savage" in the program notes but bordering on melodrama, describes Schoenberg's raging desperateness as the Jews flee Nazist Warsaw, and his resumption of the Jewish faith in the face of this tragic modern Diaspora. This profound personal utterance seems to suffer from the same type of self-consciously tortured text which reduced Bernstein's Kaddish symphony to almost complete...
...written Oliver Twist to rip the brocade from Puritan England and reveal the human misery beneath. To those who found his melodrama too coarse, Dickens replied: "Criminal characters, to suit them, must be, like their meat, in delicate disguise ... It is wonderful," he continued, "how Virtue turns from dirty stockings; and how Vice, married to ribbons and a little gay attire, changes her name, as wedded ladies do, and becomes Romance...
...current production, Gilbert's burlesque of late 19th-century melodrama is presented all but dead-pan by actors nearly as immobile as the lectern-bound participants in a dramatic reading. Having abandoned all but the most incidental attempts to give character to his leads or to fortify the humor of the text with sight gags, Paul G. Cooper reduces himself from a director to a variety of quartermaster. His sole purpose and accomplishment is to deliver the proper number of actors to any part of the stage which will accommodate them, in time for the musical numbers. No 18th-century...
Cooper's abdication is all the more disastrous because rapid changes of character are the essence of the play; for they parody the mechanics of melodrama while they suggest often-embarrassing affinities between a figure's old pose and his new one. Of the male leads only Stuart Rubinow displays the emotional range necessary to do justice to the hectic script. His Sir Despard Murgatroyd is first exuberantly wicked as the bad baronet who pays for his sins by contributing to the Church. Several abrupt turns of the plot later and on the right side...