Our first play 4 years ago was a melodrama and it was fun. We made two mistakes. We had oleos which made the play toooooo long. And we gave everyone a bag of popcorn which created such a noise coming from the audience that we could hardly hear each other on stage. I can still hear the noise of everyone reaching into their popcorn bags. We did not use live music except for the oleos.

I didn't direct this play or do anything other than have a small part, but everyone's contentions was what I wrote above.
Barb

 Cool.  I pretty much wanted to see what other people have done and what has worked well for them and what hasn't.  We are doing olios, but the play is just under an hour without them and we are limiting it to 5 (2 + MC introduction before the show and 3 just before the curtian rises for act 2.  I'll definately do a sing a long (joining song?) Gaafa thats a really good idea.  Get people warmed up.

In the current play I'm doing, it wouldn't work so well cuz it's taking place in a News Paper office.  Next year I'm going to be doing "Face on the Barroom Floor.  Or...Looking through the Sawdust"  at least I'm planning on it (lol a lot can happen in a year) and if I can work it, that would be great for that show since it takes place in a bar.  

Many years ago we did the melodrama The Drunkard arranged by Barry Manilow.  This was a huge hit.  Probably the most enjoyable part from the audience point of view was the singalongs we did during scene changes.  I can still remember the audiences (mostly college students) (mostly drunk) calling out to sing "number five!" which was the "Ragtime Gal" song made famous by the Michigan J Frog cartoon.  Drunks realy enjoy actively participating in a show.

I've acted in two melodramas.  The first we had live music (a badly tuned piano).  We encouraged the audience to throw popcorn  at and boo and hiss the villain(not so fun at strike, though it didn't hurt the actors).  It may have had olios, not sure.  It was actually a musical melodrama, Tim Kelly (?) has a bunch of them as either musical or straight.  The second one, we did the show with the local chapter of Sweet Adelines.  They did all the musical numbers and we acted in between.  No popcorn!  We did the "card" thing with "Boo, Hiss" and "10 months later", etc.