Word: melodrama
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Puccini: Tosco (Chorus and Orchestra of the Teatro Reale of Rome, Oliviero de Fabritiis conducting, with Maria Caniglia, Beniamino Gigli, Armando Borgioli and other singers; Victor: 2 volumes, 28 sides). Puccini's great operatic melodrama recorded complete by as lusty a group of Italian songbirds as can be found today...
...tragic last act of Juno and the Paycock is spoiled by wanton melodrama. Too late, too violently, O'Casey pushes the son and daughter into the limelight. Their fate-not having the full force of the play behind it -seems manipulated, its effect on Juno mawkish. But it is proof of O'Casey's real power that his Paycock should remain comic from start to finish. The Paycock is a callous wastrel for whom O'Casey has only bitter scorn; but he is a born "character," and O'Casey lets him cut his capers without...
Some Wylie selections: best quiz show, Information Please; best human interest, We, the People; best variety, Kate Smith's hour; best fun, Fred Allen's; best melodrama, Gang Busters' dramatization of Bank Robber Eddie Doll's career; best children's shows, Ireene Wicker's musicked Alice in Wonderland, The Nuremberg Stove from the Let's Pretend series; best verse, Archibald MacLeish's Air Raid, Norman Corwin's Seems Radio Is Here to Stay; best news dramatization, THE MARCH OF TIME; best spot news reporting, Jack Knell's on the Squalus...
Comedy. The Dies Committee hearings made a rip-roaring Texas melodrama full of spies, plots, trap doors, enemy agents, hairbreadth escapes, made thunderous by howls of pain from the injured, cries of outrage from the accused-a breathless drama of pure Americanism versus nobody quite knew what, packed with sordid procedures, damnable outrages, cries of "Unhand-me-Martin-Dies!" from radicals, and "Let that poor girl go!" from liberals-and all galloping over the cliff at the end of each installment. The Smith Committee hearings were drawing-room comedy...
Fascism v. democracy is their favorite, though only a brand new reader of novels would find anything new on the subject. In the worst of them, Charles Francis Stocking's Out of the Dust (Maestro, Chicago, $2.75), an American in Germany huffs & puffs through an interminable, blowhard melodrama. Frances Parkinson Keyes's The Great Tradition (Messner, $2.50) pictures in drawing room prose the democratic gropings of a German-U. S. aristocrat in Germany and revolutionary Spain. A cut above them is W. Townend's Rescue of Captain Leggatt (Morrow, $2.50), naively melodramatizing the enmity and brotherly reconciliation...