Word: melodrama
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...play should be a comedy, and often is. But Mr. Ginsburg had three or four too many minds working at once, and he drops in unfortunate streaks of tragedy and melodrama. Much of this seems due to unwillingness to write his own play--he lets history control too much of the plot, and too rarely selects or rejects events or details. He makes a sprawling leap into the life of the prince regent (the future King George IV) of England, and hopes, evidently, that a comedy with serious scenes and historical validity will emerge. Instead, he creates an amorphous opus...
...Tattered Dress (Universal-International) is a courtroom melodrama. The hero (Jeff Chandler), cast as "the greatest trial lawyer since Clarence Darrow," is a sort of jukebox genius who will sing almost any tune for almost anybody who provides the coin. When a young hellionaire (Philip Reed) murders his wife's boy friend. Lawyer Chandler finagles an acquittal. For the next hour or so the pattern of the plot looks like something perpetrated by a drunken silkworm. Is the sheriff (Jack Carson) the crook? Is the hero the villain? Is the lawyer the defendant? Does anybody care? Actor Chandler seems...
...Williams' is often as lopsided; few highly personal visions of life are notably panoramic. What tells against Orpheus Descending is less something limited than something lurid; what vitiates the play, even as it animates it, is so canny a theater sense. It is the stage's melodrama, not the world's malevolence, that consistently wears its heartlessness on its sleeve...
...visual defects. From the richly ornamented outpouring of awakening emotion in the first act to the flexible, bitter-sweet lyricism of the last, Tebaldi superbly defined Violetta's stirrings and renunciation; moreover, she avoided flawing the role with more than the necessary touches of sentimentality and melodrama. Baritone Leonard Warren was splendid as a resonant-voiced Germont. As Alfredo, Tenor Giuseppe Cam-pora had neither enough power nor presence to hold the stage, but to appear with Tebaldi in last week's production would not have been easy for any singer. The Met crowd was clearly there...
...most other concertmasters in the U.S., Polish-born Richard Burgin gets two or three weeks a year on the podium. Last week he led the Boston Symphony at Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, in a concert of Vaughan Williams, Beethoven and Shostakovich, which he delivered with craftsmanship and no melodrama whatever. "I know what I want, I know how to tell them what I want, and they give it to me," he said, adding as an afterthought: "just as they give it to any other conductor, only maybe to me a little quicker...