Word: melodramas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Prokofiev: Ivan the Terrible (Mezzo Irina Arkhipova, Baritone Anatoly Mokrenko, Narrator Boris Morgunov, Ambrosian Chorus and Philharmonia Orchestra, Riccardo Muti, conductor; Angel; 2 LPs). This oratorio, arranged from Prokofiev's score for Eisenstein's two-part Ivan the Terrible film, makes splendid melodrama. Muti conducts a dashing blend of ominous march rhythms, pagan-sounding brass flourishes and pealing Russian bells...
...knockoff. Like Renoir's 1939 film, it offers a moving portrait of a society on the brink of convulsive change. Set just after the 1917 Revolution, the film takes place in pastoral Crimea, where a harried group of actors and moviemakers are trying to complete a frivolous silent melodrama. Hundreds of miles away, the government has fallen to the Bolsheviks, but the film company tries to go doggedly about its business. Inevitably, Slave's characters discover that not even artists can hide from the onrushing forces of history...
...Melodrama of love and death...
...most important difference, however, is one of tone. The old play was written as a straight melodrama, with everything to be taken relatively seriously. But Hall and Richmond have intentionally laced their play with lots of funny lines; and one remark in the third act rightly puts the audience into an uproar...
...each show, Springsteen will drop to one knee in front of the mike and yell with the sort of mock melodrama that cloaks an almost literal truth, "I'm just a prisoner . . . of rock 'n' roll!" In the audience, his fellow lifers laugh and cheer, delirious inmates in the same cell. Of all those prisoners, though, only the Boss holds...