Word: melodrama
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...best of the home-grown dramas include the tender, poetic family chronicle, All the Way Home, and Advise and Consent, a tense political melodrama. As for the musicals: although it is currently fashionable to dismiss it, Camelot holds many treasures that make it worth seeing; Do Re Mi survives only through the shenanigans of Stars Phil Silvers and Nancy Walker. Which leaves two of the year's least pretentious works but also its zingiest -Carol Channing's satirical revue, Show Girl, and An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine...
...Sunshine, a boffo operetta satirizing the Kerny, Frimlous past. Among worthy revivals, there is a superlative production of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, a welcome reprise of Epitaph for George Dillon, by John Osborne and Anthony Creighton, and one sleeper, The Octoroon, a reasonably lively, reasonably funny-by-now melodrama of pre-Civil War days...
...farce-satire by perky Avant-Gardist Eugene lonesco; A Taste of Honey, a sort of earthy British lonely-hearts story; and the wonderfully pert French musical Irma La Douce. The domestic dramas include the tender, poetic family chronicle, All the Way Home; Advise and Consent, a tense political melodrama; and Tennessee Williams' Period of Adjustment, a lively but somehow disappointing comedy-lecture on marital success. Among the musicals: although it is currently fashionable to dismiss it, Camelot holds many treasures that make it worth seeing; Do Re Mi, a Runyonesque piece, is nearly salvaged by the antics of Phil...
Charles Olsen, who directed the production, chose to accent the melodrama, which is a good idea for most of Miller's plays. But there is no way to dilute the false rhetoric and high mindedness which keep All My Sons from being pure and pleasant melodrama. Bill Simpson's sets were garish and out of keeping with the tone of the play...
...motives. He bore from the first the pale cast of after-thought. Given the convention, the authors who kept the Jew-villain in circulation created their man with a good deal of spontaneity. The Jew-villain might not be a realistic figure; but within the canons of comedy and melodrama he could give the illusory appearance of being a creature of flesh and blood. The purveyors of the immaculate Jew, on the other hand, produced not so much a character as a formula. Riah and his type will not bleed if you prick them...