Word: melodrama
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...students. Newspaper clippings record that at the first performance of this play in Boston, twenty years before, "The college showed very tangible disapproval." Vegetables were probably the order of the day. H. D. C. decided to revamp the production. Under satirical treatment, "Brown of Harvard" responded nobly. With due melodrama the hero thwarted those who would tread on his good name and arrived in the nick of time to lead his crew to victory over Oxford. Harvard cheered loud and lustily, and seemed fully to catch the spirit of the thing...
...year's production, "Napoleon Intrades," which had to be held over for an extra performance, and by the marked revival of University interest in its productions, as in the early twenties, H. D. C. offers this fall "Circumstantial Evidence." This play, by Otto Bastion, is not the usual courtroom melodrama, but rather a poignant presentation of a problem that is more and more becoming of vital interest...
...program note testifies: "Every character in this play is drawn from the personal experiences of Jack Black during his years as a criminal or as a prisoner. The types are real and these people actually lived." They do not live in Mr. Black's melodrama...
...story of The Sign of the Cross, included in the repertory of every stock company in England since it was first played in 1895, is obvious devotional melodrama. Nero (Charles Laughton) orders his lieutenant, Marcus Superbus (Fredric March), to clear Rome of Christians. While doing so, Marcus falls in love with a Christian girl named Mercia (Elissa Landi). This makes the vicious Empress Poppaea (Claudette Colbert) jealous. Marcus Superbus tries to persuade Mercia to become a pagan. He fails. Nero wants to forgive her for being a Christian but Poppaea, to save Marcus from what she considers a misalliance, refuses...
...have been in the original German, it has become in English a curious mixture of heavy-handed love-scenes and theatrical seduction--scenes alternating with bits as deft and sophisticated as you could wish. A string of witty lines follows theatrics in the style of the old snowstorm melodrama...