Melodrama has never gotten much respect and yet, with the movies and television, it is more popular today that it was a hundred years ago when it dominated the legitimate stage. Arthur Hobson Quinn, who 50 years ago wrote the definitive History of the American Drama, noted that American melodrama of the 19th century often had “impossible actions,” “absurd characters,” and a dialogue that bordered on the ludicrous. Caught in the Villain’s Web, the play we are presenting this evening, is a spoof of that tradition and it manages quite nicely to meet all three parts of Quinn’s definition. We found the dialogue especially interesting because it is littered with one shameless cliché after another.

With its traditional mixture of storytelling and music, the origin of melodrama can be traced back to the Greek plays. The word came into the language, however, in France in the 1760’s as melodrame, and the French melodrames, noted Quinn, were sensational plays, “abounding in terrifying incidents, artificially motivated characters, overstated pathos, or tensions arbitrarily provoked by chance.” By the end of the 19th century, because labor was inexpensive, melodramas typically featured elaborate stage settings–a treadmill with real horses for the chariot races of Ben Hur, for example. Because these sets were so complex, it took time to make the change from one scene to another, and to keep the audience from getting restless, the actors were asked to appear before the curtain to perform whatever entertainment they were capable of providing.

There would be singing, dancing, comic routines, pantomime, juggling, whatever, and initially there was no thematic link between these entertainments and the melodrama itself. They became known as “olios,” a word that literally means “a heavily spiced stew of meat, vegetables, and chickpeas.” For this play, we are working with a very simple set, but between the acts we will be providing some tasty musical numbers in the tradition of the melodrama of a century ago.

Another tradition of the old-fashioned melodrama is audience participation. Our Master of Ceremonies will tell you all about that in greater detail just before we begin, but you might right now start to prepare to contribute some spirited cheers for our hero and heroine, and some hisses and boos for our nefarious villain. That’s all part of the fun.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 8th, 2002 at 9:24 am and is filed under Now on Stage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.