Word: melodrama
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...fiction writers laid one golden egg after another and sold them for golden prices. The public craved, and was given, gulps of cloak-&-dagger melodrama or sack-suit passion. Some of the year's novelists managed, with the help of book clubs and cinemagnates, to earn a life annuity with a single book. Among the bestsellers...
Prokofiev is not so well known in the U.S. for the kind of superpatriotic melodrama that characterized Shostakovich's Leningrad and May Day symphonies. But he has written his share. In 1939, as a birthday present to his boss, he wrote a piece called Homage to Stalin. He also did a Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution, using words by Marx, Lenin and Stalin. Except for a Romeo and Juliet suite, nearly everything he has written in the U.S.S.R. has been built on Russian folk themes, and to glorify Russia's past and present...
Miss Bacall occasionally remarks in a loud monotone: "I hate melodrama." Her protest does not, in any sense, stop the show. All the supporting players do their jobs efficiently. Wanda Hendrix stands out sharply as a downtrodden little...
...clash between two eras as well as two men, Beggars might have been good melodrama with something extra-something picturesque and a little touching. But the play lets Frankie down as badly as his partner did. Intended as a colorful has-been, Frankie merely seems like something that never was. And as a story, Beggars is no Better. The flowering of romance between Frankie and the supper club's leg-some cigaret girl (Dorothy Comingore) is banal and forced. When Frankie tries to act tough, Playwright Reeves lets comedy seep into scenes that should be hard-hitting theater...
...real trouble is that the play is missing a consistency of emphasis on some one central theme. "The Secret Room" is essentially a melodrama. But at moments during the first two acts it seems to be aiming in the direction of a psychological study, and once, with some references to Miss Ferroni's aristocratic background, some special implications are thrown in. The producers evidently realize that this is confusing, as an entire new first act is to be put in early next week and should make a substantial indifference...