Word: melodrama
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...Metropolitan, the U.S. opera composer writes in a certain vein. His typical product is a lightweight one-acter with few characters (although it may have a chorus, since singers are plentiful on campuses) and a small orchestra. Its plot is likely to be a fantasy with more moral than melodrama; one act is too short, and young artists are not best suited for grand passion. Its music stems from the German style, i.e., continuous, more or less expressive singing, rather than from the Italian fashion with its separate, show-stopping arias. The voice parts, in their way, are likely...
...soon masters her urbanity and by the end is consummately cruel. When the Prince, Keith Gardiner, is singing, he is fine, but otherwise he is awkward, as is the King, Michael Pollatsek. Pollatsek, however, is supposed to be funny. One only wonders why he adopted the manner of a melodrama villain. The Fairy Godmother's Oriental shuffle is likewise a puzzlement...
...believe was to whip her. His wife Elizabeth sent her to a dancing and singing teacher and sneaked with her to shows at the Harlem Opera House. She got Laurette her first stage job when she was 13, married her off to Charles Taylor, a successful writer of corny melodrama, when she was 16. After ten years Laurette divorced him, but not before she had played his bad scripts hundreds of times, been broke in scores of touring towns, and borne him two children (one, Marguerite, is the author of this book...
...mixture of farce and melodrama, the play is full of sweetness and vinegar. But not until the third act did O'Casey's anticlerical lines provoke the gallery into boos, hisses and shouts. When a pompous canon told some of the characters: "The Church is ashamed of you, the bishop is ashamed of you, and I am ashamed of you," somebody bellowed from the gallery, "And we are ashamed of you!" Protests also rose when O'Casey's unorthodox priest (a sympathetic character) urged a girl to seek release from her "foolish vows" of chastity...
...streamliner into the Arizona hamlet, it is the first time the train has stopped there in for years. Vast desert countryside, in CinemaScope, presents an appropriately morbid and untrammeled background for Black Rock, which contains the usual lawless gang and hapless sheriff. Conspicuously absent, however, is the stereotyped melodrama which might have brought Bad Day at Black Rock down to the level of typical cowboy films...