Word: melodrama
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Authenticity is the watchword of the production, and director David Mills sacrifices all else to the goal of recreating the melodrama just as it was performed in the 1830s. Stylized acting, with standard gestures, asides, appeals to heaven, and so on can be entertaining if thrown into a performance as comic relief. A full play of it tends to alienate even the most hardened of audiences...
...WOLVES OF WILLOUGHBY CHASE, by Joan Aiken. Children may have to wait until their parents finish reading this sly and delightful melodrama in which ravening wolves are the least of the Victorian villains that beset our two young heroines...
...STREETS OF NEW YORK blinks rather amusingly through the crocodile tears of Dion Boucicault's 19th century melodrama. The singing voices in this lively musical have near-perfect pitch, and the spoofing is stylish...
...STREETS OF NEW YORK blinks rather amusingly through the crocodile tears of Dion Boucicault's 19th century melodrama. The singing voices in this lively musical have near-perfect pitch, and the spoofing is stylish...
...piece about slavery, the longing dreams of a chain gang led by McKayle served as a vehicle for Carmen de Lavallade and her exquisite dances as wife, sweetheart, and mother. But another vehicle might have been chosen which did not end in the melodrama of a slave's murder. In this episode a dancer expresses impotent rage--a very profound emotion-- by running downstage, screwing up his face, and making a punching motion across his body. McKayle should be commended for trying to treat serious themes and not resting content, as some masters do, to play prima donna...