Word: melodrama
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...comments. I draw so much attention to this part of the afternoon, for it was the most enjoyable. Proof featured solid acting, and was led by Parker’s fascinating, if somewhat hard to rationalize, portrayal. The play itself, though, seemed to lack depth and compensated with melodrama which, at times, make it decently suspenseful and enjoyable, but at the end, left me feeling that I had witnessed something less than substantial...
...description, "diva" carries certain burdens. One must not only sing one's heart out; one must expose it to the harshest elements. What becomes a legend most? Suffering. A childhood of deprivation; liaisons with powerful, possibly dangerous men; career triumph soured by personal despair. A life of melodrama makes the diva more human, thus more godlike, to her fans. A catchy moniker helps: Callas...Garland...Lady Day...Whitney. The singer in the news last week was no exception, seemingly groomed by her parents for divadom. For a start, they called the kid Mariah...
...KINGMAKERS In the early ?50s, Atlantic occasionally bought the national rights to local R&B hits. One of these was Leiber and Stoller?s "Smokey Joe?s Cafe." A lurking melodrama in the "Hernando?s Hideaway" fashion (but written a year before that Broadway tune), it?s sung by L&S? L.A. discoveries the Robins. It features an almost maniacally comic attack by lead singer Carl Gardner. The vocal could have come right off the Chitlin Circuit of black vaudeville; imagine Mantan Moreland as a great belter. The production is full, clear and incorrigibly boppin?- Leiber and Stoller...
...Room tells a wrenching story - of a happy family riven by the teenage son's death - in acutely somber vignettes that avoid the seductions of sentimentality and melodrama. The Piano Teacher stirs up a tasty poison porridge of lusts and hatreds between a precocious pianist (Benoît Magimel) and his stern tutor (Isabelle Huppert); in chic, lurid images it suggests that teachers, perhaps all adults, try to express and exorcise their frustrations by dominating their charges. In coarser hands, this tale of obsession and self-mutilation could be ludicrous from the start; in these hands it is goofy only...
...from summer stock. Don Schlitz has written music with a country twang but cornball lyrics ("He?s full of that old scratch /Impossible to catch"), and the odd, earth-toned sets make this Mississippi River town look like something the Pharoahs built. The show does rev up some lively melodrama in the second act, with an exciting cave climax that kids might enjoy. But this show has little to attract paying adults - unless they're looking for a rest after standing in line for tickets to "The Producers...