But it was pretty minor-league stuff; the highest his temperature had ever gone was 100.7, and that wasn't exactly the stuff of which high melodrama was made.

"Elaborate schemes for dramatic and systemwide change," Ms. Prestine concluded, "may provide high melodrama but little more."

This involved incorporating many features of melodrama; thus, for example, the séance is high melodrama.

"Bound by Honor" presents their lives as an unending succession of moments of high melodrama.

Throughout the 19th century new dramatic versions were regularly churned out to great success, but they are high melodrama.

The second series received very mixed reviews, with most critics saying it had left realism for high melodrama and contrived plots.

"The Deserter's Home," meanwhile, is high melodrama.

She bleeds from a gunshot, calling out for help to Mary, who has gone mad; it is a moment of purposefully high melodrama.

This scene is high melodrama, and the point at which "High Heels" boom erangs and becomes sentimental.

In short, here is the stuff of high melodrama, and what it all means to re-create is the state of New Jersey's professional theaters in 1990.