'In Melodrama Revised, an essay from 1998, film theorist Linda Williams suggests melodrama situates the audience in a direct empathetic relationship with a victim, so we emotionally experience the victim’s subjugation and then triumph with their overcoming. Oscillating between pathos and action, this is the dominant mode of popular American cinema (and culture more broadly).' (Introduction)
'Bloom, the new Australian musical produced by the Melbourne Theatre Company, is proudly billed by the company as born and bred right here in Melbourne/Naarm.' (Introduction)
'Dolly Maunder, born in 1881, is the sixth of seven children of a sheep-farming family outside Tamworth in northern New South Wales. Their lives are a relentless round of hard work, indoors and out, relieved only a by few brief years at the local one-teacher school.' (Introduction)