Word: melodrama
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...Titanic, it turns out, is no disaster, just an uninspired shipboard melodrama with watery songs, predictable musings about the hubris of the enterprise, and a surfeit of cliched characters. They include the ship's craven owner, who keeps urging the captain to increase the speed; aristocrats like the John Jacob Astors and the Isidor Strauses, who drown with dignity; and some tiresomely idealistic Irish immigrants in steerage. What director Richard Jones and scenic designer Stewart Laing have accomplished, however, is an imaginative, even haunting, stage rendering of the sinking: the stage tilts ominously; faces of the doomed passengers appear...
...Life is far from perfect. While startlingly raw for Broadway (the hookers are grungy, fleshy and foul-mouthed), the milieu will seem old hat to anyone who has seen, say, an episode of NYPD Blue, and the melodrama is often heavy-handed. What transforms the show is Coleman's vital, jazzy score--his best since Sweet Charity--and Michael Blakemore's crisp, less-is-more staging. The show starts out in high gear with an infectiously cynical ode to self-interest (Use What You Got), sung by hustler-narrator Jojo (the excellent Sam Harris), and keeps topping itself. Lillias White...
...evening belongs to Nuccio, the ever-slick sorcerer who with one raised eyebrow can send chills down anyone's back. Without ever resorting to melodrama or slapstick comedy, Nuccio gives a performance that is as funny as it is frightening. His dry subtlety sparks laughter from almost everyone yet his mere presence casts an ominous shadow across the stage. His voice may not be as musically powerful as some of the cast's, but he has the power to enunciate and, most importantly, act, which more than makes up for his minor shortcomings as a singer. By the time...
...play is not be treated seriously but certainly not with the solemnity that the cast of Baal at the Loeb Ex did. In fact, many, especially amateurs, stay away from lyrical, intense tragedies on stage these days precisely because of the danger of ending up as hollow, over-choreographed melodrama...
Striving for drollness, Schrader sometimes achieves a distancing effect instead. Neither the comedy nor the melodrama is quite as compelling as it might be. But Touch was never meant to be Get Shorty. It is rather a wintry meditation on the difficulties of sustaining authentic faith in the age of telemortality. For that work, its cynicism, wry but not weary, is very effective...