(n.) 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.
(n.) A series of real events invested with a dramatic unity and interest.
(n.) Dramatic composition and the literature pertaining to or illustrating it; dramatic literature.
Example Sentences:
(1) Peter retired in 1998, when he was appointed CBE for his services to drama.
(2) The dramas are part of the BBC2 controller Janice Hadlow's plans for her "unashamedly intelligent" channel over the coming months.
(3) Here's a certainty: When you play out your personal dramas, hurt and self-interest in the media, it's a confection.
(4) While ITV1's Harry Hill and the final series of BBC1's Gavin and Stacey will stay put, Sky1 did manage to secure US drama House, starring Hugh Laurie, from Channel Five, paying an estimated £500,000 an episode.
(5) There could be no faulting the atmosphere or the football drama.
(6) A Catholic boys’ school has reversed its permission to allow civil rights drama Freeheld, starring Julianne Moore and Ellen Page as a lesbian couple, to shoot on location in New York State.
(7) Mr Bae stars in a popular drama, Winter Sonata, a tale of rekindled puppy love that has left many Japanese women hankering for an age when their own men were as sensitive and attentive as the Korean actor.
(8) "We don't think British drama is failing because these things are so good – it just shows that other countries do good drama."
(9) Limits are a relief, because they concentrate the drama and free the writer from the torture of choice, as Aristotle knew when he advised playwrights to preserve "the unities" by telling one story in one place over a single day.
(10) George RR Martin , whose series of novels inspired the HBO drama , has woven a tapestry of extraordinary size and richness; and most of the threads he has used derive from the history of our own world.
(11) He'd later carry this over into Netflix's House Of Cards but before that, TV had already begun to emulate this new, bleak, antiheroic maturity with a cycle of dark, longform, acclaimed dramas, commencing with The Sopranos and culminating in Breaking Bad .
(12) The prime minister told the Radio Times he was a fan of the "brilliant" US musical drama Glee, preferred Friends to The West Wing, and chose Lady Gaga over Madonna, and Cheryl Cole over Simon Cowell.
(13) He knew his subject personally, having worked with him on the 1993 romantic drama Poetic Justice , in which the rapper starred opposite Janet Jackson.
(14) Phoenix will next be seen in James Gray's Lowlife, a historical drama about immigrants in 1900s New York.
(15) Ellen Page is to make her directorial debut with Miss Stevens, starring Anna Faris as a teacher chaperoning a mob of high school students to a state drama competition.
(16) The first episode of the gothic drama pulled in 6.1 million viewers on Easter Monday but that number dropped to only 4.5 million for the second episode, prompting fears that the audience numbers could decline even further for Wednesday's finale.
(17) This House , his witty political drama set in the whips' office of 1970s Westminster, transferred from the National's Cottesloe theatre to the Olivier, following critical acclaim.
(18) Whatever conclusion the crowd might have drawn, what's striking is that Tempest's poem couldn't be ignored: the conviction and drama of her performance forced a reaction and coloured the rest of the evening.
(19) (Personally, I think a perfect contemporary drama would highlight the quiet, fraught, human, ongoing battle between those who want to live life and those who want to live life electronically.
(20) Meanwhile he is preparing a new double piano concerto by Kevin Volans with the Labèque sisters for a concert at the Edinburgh festival next week, and he tells me with a glint in his eye about ideas for the next two seasons: concert performances of Don Giovanni this October, more Brahms symphonies, and more Berlioz – an ambitious plan to realise the gigantic drama of Roméo and Juliette on a chamber-orchestral scale, following up his rapturously received performances of L'Enfance du Christ in February.
Melodrama
Definition:
(n.) Formerly, a kind of drama having a musical accompaniment to intensify the effect of certain scenes. Now, 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 gravedigging scene of Beethoven's "Fidelio".
Example Sentences:
(1) Reith, “his dour handsome face scarred like that of a villain in a melodrama”, was “a strange shepherd for such a mixed, bohemian flock … he had under his aegis a bevy of ex-soldiers, ex-actors, ex-adventurers which … even a Dartmoor prison governor might have had difficulty in controlling”.
(2) Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, said Mr Carman would be remembered for turning "the courtroom into melodrama".
(3) Before the digital age, they created their own technology to make sound montages, taking ironic liberties with pastiche and parody, as in "Sugar-cane fields forever", or the exaggerated Latin melodrama of El Justiciero (The Avenger) They were influenced by concrete poetry and avant-garde music.
(4) Basing the film on Walter Lord's meticulously researched book (adapted by Ambler), Baker opted for a documentary approach that focused on the human interest without recourse to melodrama, making it both moving and exciting.
(5) While on television the US capital is fascinated by a glamorous, distorting mirror of itself: The West Wing (liberal fantasy), House of Cards (the devil as president) and Scandal (preposterous melodrama).
(6) Dallas had buckets of money, on and off screen, and buckets of melodrama.
(7) It's just that he gets ultra-stressed by things that many of us choose to ignore, and melodrama can ensue.
(8) Transposing the Brothers Grimm to 1920s Spain, he doffs his montera not only to European silent cinema of the period, but to bullfighting and flamenco, with an atmospheric Gothic melodrama that has lashings of humour – mostly provided by Maribel Verdú as the social-climbing evil stepmother with a penchant for S&M – bags of invention, and an expressive, flamenco-inflected score by Alfonso de Vilallonga.
(9) His other forte was as a 1950s director of widescreen colour melodramas often adapted from the fatter, racier bestsellers of the postwar paperback revolution, many of which have developed separate cults of their own.
(10) It took two weeks for him to address the issue publicly, while his wife Patience was accused of melodrama smacking of insincerity when she met mothers of the kidnapped girls.
(11) For many, France's elimination from the tournament after six days of melodrama in which obscenities were thrown, players went on strike and a coach walked out, came as something of a relief.
(12) A h, the many Proustian pleasures to be derived from a renewed acquaintance with Roy Ward Baker 's 1958 Titanic melodrama A Night To Remember ... Last seen by me on some wintry Sunday afternoon in the prepubescent early 1970s, probably in the same post-prandial time-slot where I first encountered The Cockleshell Heroes, Carve Her Name With Pride and The Colditz Story – the dull roar of British postwar self-congratulation on film.
(13) It was a difficult production – the director wanted it to be a slightly Edwardian melodrama and we couldn't get our heads around the concept.
(14) Despite a testament as harrowing as his, and for all its meticulous refusal of melodrama, the Holocaust has become subject to sneering scepticism – now outright denial, now the slower drip of devaluation and diminishment.
(15) For the life of me I cannot understand why it is somehow correct for all of your privacy to be invaded for a commercial purpose and not allow me to do it to save your life.” Irvine added: “Is that dramatic enough?” The Victorian Labor senator Jacinta Collins said: “It’s an amusing defence because I think you’ll find most people are concerned about the other also.” Ludlam said: “I think it’s probably heading towards melodrama rather than just drama.” 'Not seeking a big brother arrangement' During the Senate hearing Irvine also laid out the case for a mandatory data retention scheme forcing telecommunications providers to store customer data for two years.
(16) Twenty-five years ago, soap operas were delivery systems for melodrama, cliffhangers, women's issues, comedy and social critique, and, best of all, white-knuckle rides on the narrative express.
(17) The best hour records lack melodrama, but are marked instead by a constantly building sense of history in the making as the raw statistics make it obvious what is coming.
(18) McDowell, a film-maker in his own right, collaborated with Kuchar on several movies, as an actor in Siamese Twin Pinheads (1972), The Sunshine Sisters (1972) and The Devil's Cleavage (1975), a 130-minute recreation of 1940s and 50s black-and-white melodramas.
(19) But disillusionment is, though often painful – and Beware of Pity has moments of high melodrama that have the power to make one put one's free hand over one's mouth as one reads – a very necessary process, and the stripping away of illusions was, after all, one of the abiding aims of the Freudian project.
(20) They approached the cold war as melodrama and McCarthyism by way of allegory.