Crossword clues for melodrama
melodrama
- Histrionics alarmed Mo terribly
- Film genre
- Theater offering
- Soap opera staple
- Overwrought behavior
- Soap, frequently
- Soap opera genre
- Silents genre
- Sensational type of play
- Plot-driven emotional production
- Offering on the screen
- Movie serial genre
- Many a soap opera
- Histrionics — sensational play
- Ham product?
- "Hamlet" actor Gibson in Ireland?
- Three-hanky film
- Ham production?
- Soap ingredient?
- Common soap ingredient
- An extravagant comedy in which action is more salient than characterization
- Extravagantly theatrical play
- Vehicle for a ham
- Model stumbling — damage after twisting — a scene that’s overwrought?
- Master a mad role, performing in sensational play
- Cast made moral sentiment the focus here?
- Cast made moral sentiment a central element of this production
- Setter a good deal curtailed after imbibing whisky? It’s a crude tale
- Sensational play
- Sensational entertainment
- Role Mad Max almost played in theatrical production
- It may feature emotional role with madam
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Drama \Dra"ma\ (dr[aum]"m[.a] or dr[=a]"m[.a]; 277), n. [L. drama, Gr. dra^ma, fr. dra^n to do, act; cf. Lith. daryti.]
-
A composition, in prose or poetry, accommodated to action, and intended to exhibit a picture of human life, or to depict a series of grave or humorous actions of more than ordinary interest, tending toward some striking result. It is commonly designed to be spoken and represented by actors on the stage.
A divine pastoral drama in the Song of Solomon.
--Milton. -
A series of real events invested with a dramatic unity and interest. ``The drama of war.''
--Thackeray.Westward the course of empire takes its way; The four first acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama with the day; Time's noblest offspring is the last.
--Berkeley.The drama and contrivances of God's providence.
--Sharp. -
Dramatic composition and the literature pertaining to or illustrating it; dramatic literature.
Note: The principal species of the drama are tragedy and comedy; inferior species are tragi-comedy, melodrama, operas, burlettas, and farces.
The romantic drama, the kind of drama whose aim is to present a tale or history in scenes, and whose plays (like those of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and others) are stories told in dialogue by actors on the stage.
--J. A. Symonds.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1784 (1782 as melo drame), "a stage-play in which songs were interspersed and music accompanied the action," from French mélodrame (18c.), from Greek melos "song" (see melody) + French drame "drama" (see drama). Meaning "a romantic and sensational dramatic piece with a happy ending" is from 1883, because this was often the form of the original melodramas. Also from French are Spanish melodrama, Italian melodramma, German melodram. Related: Melodramatize.\n\nThe melodramatist's task is to get his characters labelled good & wicked in his audience's minds, & to provide striking situations that shall provoke & relieve anxieties on behalf of poetic justice.
[Fowler]
Wiktionary
n. 1 (context archaic uncountable English) A kind of drama having a musical accompaniment to intensify the effect of certain scenes. 2 (context countable English) A drama abounding in romantic sentiment and agonizing situations, with a musical accompaniment only in parts which are especially thrilling or pathetic. In opera, a passage in which the orchestra plays a somewhat descriptive accompaniment, while the actor speaks; as, the melodrama in the grave digging scene of Beethoven's "Fidelio". 3 (context uncountable figuratively colloquial English) Any situation or action which is blown out of proportion.
WordNet
n. an extravagant comedy in which action is more salient than characterization
Wikipedia
A melodrama is a dramatic or literary work in which the plot, which is typically sensational and designed to appeal strongly to the emotions, takes precedence over detailed characterization. Characters are often simply drawn, and may appear stereotyped.
In scholarly and historical musical contexts, melodramas are dramas of the 18th and 19th centuries in which orchestral music or song was used to accompany the action. The term is now also applied to stage performances without incidental music, novels, movies, and television and radio broadcasts. In modern contexts, the term "melodrama" is generally pejorative, as it suggests that the work in question lacks subtlety, character development, or both. By extension, language or behavior which resembles melodrama is often called melodramatic; this use is nearly always pejorative.
The term originated from the early 19th-century French word mélodrame. It is derived from Greek melos, music, and French drame, drama (from Late Latin drāma, eventually deriving from classical Greek δράμα, theatrical plot, usually of a Greek tragedy).
Melodrama is the first album by Israeli psychedelic trance duo Vibe Tribe, released in November 2004. The audio mastering was made by Astral Projection member Lior Perlmutter and the artwork by Czech artist Jan Moravec. Originally the album was supposed to be called V.B.-3B.1 and "Rearranged" was originally called Eye Cue.
Melodrama refers to a dramatic work which exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions
Melodrama may also refer to:
- Melodrama (Vibe Tribe album), 2004
- Melodrama (Joel Kroeker album), 2004
- Melodrama (The Crash album), 2003
Melodrama is the first studio album by Joel Kroeker and the second of his albums after his 1999 independent release CD Naive Bohemian. The album was released in 2004 on True North Records and was produced by Danny Greenspoon. It was registered at the "Canterbury Sound" in Toronto, Ontario, in Canada.
Usage examples of "melodrama".
To please the actors, and especially my mother, I wrote a kind of melodrama, in which I brought out two harlequins.
Has even modern melodrama quite lost that immortal type of the ranting, bombastic tyrant and villain?
Senate hearings on the nomination, and the memorable nationally televised melodrama that followed.
Navaho Elixir International and Oriental Al Fresco Entertainments, with the Old Indian Doctor, who had a charming sing-song Swedish accent, making a violent ventriloquist melodrama with three puppets.
To please the actors, and especially my mother, I wrote a kind of melodrama, in which I brought out two harlequins.
Wartime Marseilles was such a bubbling stew of political double-dealing, financial corruption, racial and nationalist crisscrossings, refugee agonies and tragedies, and Mediterranean finagling dating back to Phoenician times, that compared to Gaither's daily grind, melodramas and spy yams paled.
If one of us is lying, then we must act out a simple melodrama of innocence pitted against iniquity.
Melodrama and unsophistication there may be -- we are told of one fastidious Frenchman who could not bear to read Poe except in Baudelaire's urbane and Gallically modulated translation -- but all traces of such things are wholly overshadowed by a potent and inborn sense of the spectral, the morbid, and the horrible which gushed forth from every cell of the artist's creative mentality and stamped his macabre work with the ineffaceable mark of supreme genius.
But most of all she longed to be transported back to the days of La Scale by hearing Torna a Surriento', the favourite song of the club and the one they would sing the most, and she would close her eyes in the most blissful state of melancholy as she heard its melody and visualised the boys outside under the olive, scarcely aware of the melodrama of their gestures as they poured their hearts and the full lust of their voices into the grippingly beautiful mordants and gracenotes of the final phrase, after which they would sit in a moment of nostalgic silence before sighing, shaking their heads, and wiping the tears from their eyes with their sleeves.
For what it may be worth to modern impresarios: I can testify from personal experience that great crowds can still be gathered by melodrama, provided that the female in the piece speaks loudly and clearly.
That Blowitz the brilliant and hard-headed reporter and interviewer was at the same time an incurable romantic with a taste for melodrama and love of the sensational, is obvious from his Memoirs, a highly entertaining work made up of material published in his lifetime and episodes dictated in his last year.
If youll leave off the melodrama for the next couple of hours and try some logical thinking instead of playacting, Ill stop taking every opportunity to point out just how guilty you look.
On top of each van was a canvas-covered roll of old backdrops and scenes used in some of the various melodramas that were the troupe's stock in trade.
His years began to seem woefully wasted, for in this emergency he had nothing on which to base his plans but remembered sequences of old melodramas or the stories of Ned Buntline.
Wide-eyed, she watched colorful melodramas in which costumed figures of good and evil battled for mastery.