Word: melodrama
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This handsome record stems largely from never playing safe. Catholic University has always refused to "warm over" recent Broadway hits. It prefers things that come out of its own workshop or off the top shelves of the classics. Last month C.U. took its first shot at American mystery melodrama-with William Gillette's creaky, 46-year-old version of Sherlock Holmes. The production, staged with finesse, was clever enough to make the creaking sounds seem, fairly often, creepy...
...represents no great strain of the imagination to call the new Courtney Burr production a Victorian melodrama, despite the fact that it says quite plainly on the program that its episodes occur in 1945 and in spite, also, of its very un-Victorian lead, Percy Kilbride, who steals the show until he finally falls through the thin surface of "Little Brown Jug's" plot and of his own tedium...
Wildwood is at once persuasive and exasperating. The agony is laid on deftly, sometimes almost impalpably. But the question persistently gnaws: is this a work of serious literature, as the author obviously desires it to be, or just a nice little melodrama spoiled by oversolemnity? A heroine so ready with tears, who walks among flowers "almost crushed with their perfection," is annoying as well as sympathetic, and is perhaps just not worth taking seriously enough to write a whole novel about...
...lend an authentic and competent touch to cinema versions of the great battles. It would have been worth while, that is, if the producers of "They Were Expendable" had refrained from turning William L. White's stirring narrative of the mosquito boat war into the usual run of synthetic melodrama...
...Bohemia a seacoast and tossed the wondrous stage direction, "Exit, pursued by a bear"-is not often, or easily, produced. Last week it got a fairly good production, turned out to be a fairly lively evening. If the hey-nonny-nonny sometimes breathed a desperate gaiety, most of the melodrama was pretty sound theater. And there were snatches of much-loved poetry (Daffodils that come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of March with beauty. . .). Most Shakespearean in reciting his lines (though he fell short in acting) was Actor Daniell. But word-spitting, eye-flashing, more-sulphurous-than...