Melodrama

"Revenge," a new soap-thriller from ABC, begins its life Wednesday on a beach at night, during what social power broker Victoria Grayson (Madeleine Stowe) will soon describe as "the final weekend of a remarkable summer in the Hamptons. " There's a gunshot, and a body, and just up the way an engagement party. Who's getting engaged is "the lovely and beguiling" Emily Thorne (Emily VanCamp), seen wiping sand mysteriously from her hand. Her fiance, "tragically privileged" Daniel Grayson (Joshua Bowman)

The misbegotten "Virginia" wants to be many things: small-town satire, coming-of-age story, teen romance, portrait of an eccentric and damaged soul, with dabs of crime caper and road trip for good measure. Nothing adds up, though, in this directorial effort from screenwriter Dustin Lance Black ("Milk"). Set among the hangdog hicks and arcade attractions of a fictional Southern beach town, the loosely autobiographical movie aims for roller-coaster passion but only flatlines. In a committed performance that can't overcome the material's shortcomings, Jennifer Connelly plays the title character, an unreliable bottle blond with a history of schizophrenia who's meant to have the poignancy of Blanche DuBois.

Marriage between word and music has never been simple, and is seldom stress-free. Take melodrama. I'm not sure what caused its meaning to change over the years. In the 18th century, melodrama was the genre of spoken word accompanied by — and elevated by — music. Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt and Richard Strauss were melodramatists. Now Oxford English Dictionary defines melodrama as "a crude appeal to the emotions. " But call it what you will, the genre in its original sense has never lost its effectiveness or appeal, as Aaron Copland's lasting "Lincoln Portrait," with its stirring orchestral score joined to Honest Abe's magnificent words, attests.

The showbiz adage that dying is easy, comedy is hard applies to opera as well. Though there are plenty of great comic operas — including Rossini's "Barber of Seville" and "The Turk in Italy" and Donizetti's "Elixir of Love" and "Don Pasquale," all presented by L.A. Opera in the past — their number pales next to the multitude of melodramas that more frequently occupy the operatic stage. "Comedy is extremely difficult," said Paul Curran, whose Santa Fe Opera production of Benjamin Britten's comic opera "Albert Herring" opens at L.A. Opera on Feb. 25. "It requires more concentration and skill than anything else.

Writers/co-stars Wendy Goldman and Judy Toll must still be giving thanks that director Ivan Reitman and his wife Genevieve Robert decided to attend their "Casual Sex," still playing the Groundling Theatre. Reitman and Robert were so taken with the comedy-musical about two women at a singles resort that they hired Goldman and Toll to write the film. Production is expected this summer--with Robert to make her directing debut. How did they react to the movie offer?

As part of the ongoing Jean Cocteau Centenary Festival, choreographer Tony Clark turned to a problematic art form--the melodrama--for his "Orphee, Oedipus and the Lady With the Red Gloves," seen Friday at the Gallery Theatre in Barnsdall Park. Long associated with musical composition in Germany and France, melodrama is distinguished as a form by the use of an actor who speaks instead of sings. It runs the risk of satisfying neither those interested in dramatic recitation nor those interested in singing--or, in this case, dancing.

Alfredo Ramos' "The Last Angry Brown Hat," at Plaza de la Raza, is a standard reunion-and-revelations play, staged with such conviction that it's possible to ignore its formulaic qualities, at least until you're out of the theater. Four former Chicano activists reunite 20 years later, after the funeral of a fifth. They meet in a garage stashed with memorabilia from their Brown Berets days. The set, credited to the "production staff and artists," looks homemade, in the very best sense.

You learn within minutes that one of the Felderman sisters works in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Two more sisters are employed there by Act 3. You can count down the minutes till disaster, and you can be pretty sure it will strike soon after mother Rebecca (Eileen T'Kaye) offers up a toast to America: "Because we know only good can come to us here."

"I never could think like other people," announces Ozren, the teenage narrator of "The Whore's Son." "It's a tragedy." But the tragedy or, to be more temperate, the misfortune, of Michael Sturminger's low-boil melodrama is that it's entirely too familiar. Underneath the movie's cool surface beats the heart of a 1940s tear-jerker. It's a subzero "Stella Dallas."

Jorge Ameer's unwieldy "Sabor Tropical" (Tropical Flavor) is part travelogue and part melodrama, and the two parts don't add up to much more than tedium. Ameer plays an online journalist, accompanying and filming Brian (Matthew Leitch), who's fleeing a romance gone sour, hoping to find sex and fun at Panama's Las Tablas carnival. Ameer takes far too long to get Brian, who comes across as cocky and spoiled, to Las Tablas, where the carnival really is spectacular.

"Revenge," a new soap-thriller from ABC, begins its life Wednesday on a beach at night, during what social power broker Victoria Grayson (Madeleine Stowe) will soon describe as "the final weekend of a remarkable summer in the Hamptons. " There's a gunshot, and a body, and just up the way an engagement party. Who's getting engaged is "the lovely and beguiling" Emily Thorne (Emily VanCamp), seen wiping sand mysteriously from her hand. Her fiance, "tragically privileged" Daniel Grayson (Joshua Bowman)

Based on a 19th-century novel that's usually characterized as sprawling, "Mysteries of Lisbon" is a hothouse melodrama seen through a cool, discerning eye. Director Rául Ruiz has called it one of his most theoretical films, but this multicourse (41/2 -hour) feast is no self-conscious demonstration of molecular gastronomy. The storytelling is straightforward, with a classical sheen, even as mischief and hallucination puncture the serene surface. The running time should not be cause for dismay; with 100-plus films to his credit, Ruiz is nothing if not a master of tone and pacing as he moves his players through the drawing rooms, hotels, convents and monasteries of Western Europe and, briefly, Brazil, unwrapping stories within stories within stories.

Gangster John Dillinger was shot down by G-Man Melvin Purvis outside of Chicago's Biograph Theater on July 22, 1934, after watching a movie — naturally, it was a gangster flick, "Manhattan Melodrama. " MGM was quick to capitalize on the Dillinger connection to publicize the film. But "Manhattan Melodrama" caught audiences' and critics' attention even before Dillinger was gunned down. Clark Gable and William Powell play lifelong friends on opposite sides of the law. Available on DVD, "Manhattan Melodrama" is fast-paced summer entertainment.

Jeanne Eagels' performance on Broadway in the 1920s as prostitute Sadie Thompson in the Somerset Maugham melodrama "Rain" won her wide renown. She's just as famous for her diva behavior and her alcohol and drug abuse. Though known for her stage roles, Eagels also made a handful of films. She scored a huge hit with her first talkie, the 1929 Maugham drama "The Letter," which has just come out on DVD. Eagels plays Leslie Crosbie, a married woman on a rubber plantation who shoots her lover.

Julian Schnabel broadens his canvas for his fourth film, "Miral," turning his lens on multiple protagonists and a half-century of Middle East strife. On the face of it a bold undertaking, the Jerusalem-set feature plays out with an awkward staidness, the results not so much prismatic as fragmented. The story of four Palestinian women, "Miral" is no political tract but a Sirkian melodrama, emphasis on heartache, selfless sacrifice and often lush visuals. The painter-turned-director knows how to manipulate his widescreen images to create a rarefied atmosphere too. But while style had an illuminating power in "Basquiat," "Before Night Falls" and "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," here it feels as self-conscious as the script's simplified history lessons.

"The Grace Card," the first filmmaking venture of the Calvary Church near Memphis, Tenn., starts promisingly, telling the story of two policemen, Sam (Michael Higgenbottom), white, middle-aged and deeply troubled, and Mac (Michael Joiner), a young African American eager to become a full-time pastor. Mac's grief over witnessing the death of his 5-year-old son at the hands of a drug dealer has ravaged his marriage and damaged his surviving son (Rob Erickson), who's about to be thrown out of the prep school his parents can ill afford.

"The Grace Card," the first filmmaking venture of the Calvary Church near Memphis, Tenn., starts promisingly, telling the story of two policemen, Sam (Michael Higgenbottom), white, middle-aged and deeply troubled, and Mac (Michael Joiner), a young African American eager to become a full-time pastor. Mac's grief over witnessing the death of his 5-year-old son at the hands of a drug dealer has ravaged his marriage and damaged his surviving son (Rob Erickson), who's about to be thrown out of the prep school his parents can ill afford.

"Shooting Stars" is a snappy little comedy that tries too hard to be a metaphor for feminism, when it just should have been happy with its ability to amuse. In a zesty staging by director John Ferzacca at Orange Coast College, Molly Newman's play fast-breaks us into the locker room of the Shooting Stars, an all-female, barnstorming basketball team on the eve of its latest game against some local men's outfit. These ladies--mostly girls, really--know what's expected of them: Put on a good show.

I am far past childhood, but I still like watching TV made for kids. Some of this is out of professional interest, obviously, but in the long span of my life and working life, the professional interest is comparatively recent, and I have never really stopped paying attention to children's television, never felt above it, or beyond it. Indeed, the more I've watched it, the more I've grown to think of it as the medium's better self ? by its very nature more colorful, wilder, weirder, purer.

The standard line on the career of Luchino Visconti is that he went from being one of the founding fathers of Italian neorealism to a master orchestrator of sumptuous historical melodramas. This shift is often viewed as a contradiction ? one of several that defined Visconti, a bisexual Marxist aristocrat ? and some even called it a betrayal, a turn from the present-day, working-class environments in which such early films as "La Terra Trema" were set to the titled, moneyed world of the past from which he came.