Word: melodrama
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Another of Shaw's targets in this play has receded from view a good deal since his day: the Victorian melodrama. But Shaw, as a practicing drama reviewer in the 1890's, was fed up to the gills with this type of play. In Caesar and Cleopatra (as well as the other two "Puritan" plays) he was poking fun at this genre and pulling the pedestal out from under the Romantic hero. The play is, then--if I may run the risk of Polonius' excessive categorization--an example of the didactic parody - melodrama. Brilliant comedy, epigrammatic wit, and hectic melodrama...
Last week's production of Ruddigore was a well-chosen and well-performed presentation. Although never a favorite with the Victorian audience (who considered its sanguinary title a bit close to the bone), Ruddigore is a good example of middleweight G. and S. with Glibert's jibes at Gothic melodrama complemented by some wonderfully quasi-Wagnerian effects by Sullivan. Purists might object to Director Robert Gibson's use of the shorter and weaker of the two second act finales extant and to his omission of the charming duet, "The Battle's Roar Is Over," but by any standards the production...
...pictures in total darkness without the use of infra-red light. Finely ground lenses can zoom in from blocks away to pick up the fine print on an insurance policy. But the Soviets like the more old-fashioned and romantic gadgets, mostly, it seems, from a native passion for melodrama...
...vacuity which characterize American campaigns--not least of all Teddy's. Hughes had taken their advice and did not change his tack during the Cuban crisis; as he pointed out in an article in Commentary several months after the elections to do anything but criticize the haste and melodrama of President Kennedy's response to the missile buildup would have been to abandon the very premises of his campaign...
...Four Days of Naples evokes sympathy for its Italion protagonists with a minimum of melodrama. It even dares to intersperse this subject with frequent snatches of ironic comedy--a gentleman, for instance, running through the streets in pajamas crying, "Rejoice, solders! We lost the War!" A cast left anonymous in tribute to the real Naples performs superbly, especially, in its use of animated facial gesture. One man being led away for the work crews wrinkles his features into a soulful stare that would have made Chaplin envious. Photography and timing art both managed with artistic sensitiveness...