A Midsummer Night's Dream: The 30-Minute Shakespeare
Product ID: 14566906
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Get young people excited about Shakespeare! The best way to experience the plays is to perform them, but getting started can be a challenge: The complete plays are too long and complex, while scene selections or simplified language are too limited. "The 30-Minute Shakespeare" is a new series of abridgements that tell the ยstoryโ of each play from start to finish while keeping the beauty of Shakespeareโs language intact. Specific stage directions and character suggestions give even inexperienced actors the tools to perform Shakespeare with confidence, understanding, and fun! This cutting focuses on three ridiculously funny and vibrant scenes from A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. The first scene starts with Puck mistakenly anointing the eyes of the wrong lovers with love potion, leading to a madcap chase scene between Helena, Lysander, Hermia, and Demetrius. Scene two features Bottom's magical transformation to an ass, always an audience favorite. The final scene is the classic play within a play, where the "Rude Mechanicals" act out with "tragical mirth" the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, with specific comic suggestions for the characters, including Lion chasing Thisbe into the audience! The edition also includes an essay by editor Nick Newlin on how to produce a Shakespeare play with novice actors, and notes about the original production of this abridgement at the Folger Shakespeare Library's annual Student Shakespeare Festival. Review: Great resource - I was expecting this to be a cut version of Midsummer Night's Dream. I had no idea that it would include all kinds of tips and ideas for putting on a classroom performance of MSND! Awesome resource! Review: Five Stars - Introduced my 5th graders to Shakespeare with this 30 minute adaptation. VERY accessible! Made performing in class a breeze.
| Best Sellers Rank | #632,010 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #186 in Stagecraft (Books) #356 in Ancient & Classical Dramas & Plays #399 in Arts & Humanities Teaching Materials |
| Customer Reviews | 4.2 out of 5 stars 29 Reviews |
J**R
Great resource
I was expecting this to be a cut version of Midsummer Night's Dream. I had no idea that it would include all kinds of tips and ideas for putting on a classroom performance of MSND! Awesome resource!
M**S
Five Stars
Introduced my 5th graders to Shakespeare with this 30 minute adaptation. VERY accessible! Made performing in class a breeze.
A**R
Stops in act two
Love this guy's work but this version of Twelfth Night ends with act two, scene three. Maybe a publishing issue but it's the same with the PDF version.
K**I
Best Ever!!
Teaching Shakespeare to middle school students can be nerve racking, but this as a resource made it easier!
M**L
Disappointing.
Missing major plot points. If youโre after a shortened version of the story, this is not for you. Their 45-Minute Hamlet was better!
R**N
Anyone creating a resource for students to enjoy performing Shakespeare deserves praise
Anyone creating a resource for students to enjoy performing Shakespeare deserves praise, and the notes accompanying this abridged text demonstrate great insight into the importance of encouraging children's own creativity in performance. However, I would not recommend using this abridgement as the basis for a young people's performance. In stark contradiction to the claim on the back cover (that the series 'tell[s] the "story" of each play from start to finish'), this text meets its 30-minute requirement by reducing Shakespeare's play to just 3 scenes. It begins with Act 3 Scene 2 and continues with 4.1 and 5.1. Therefore we never meet the delightful, funny and likeable characters of the mechanicals until they are already performing their play. We never learn that Hermia is threatened with punishment by death if she refuses to marry the man her father has chosen for her. We only meet the character of Nick Bottom after he has been transformed into a man with a donkey's head, so his behaviour has no particular meaning to it. In short, this version does not give the children the opportunity to really tell this great story. The scenes that do make it into this cut have been shortened by simply taking out lines. All the remaining lines are straight from Shakespeare. This has been done with skill though at times it seems odd when one half of a rhyming pair is left hanging. Finally a word on the stage directions. If you read the notes you realise that the author encourages pupils to have their own ideas about how to act. However the stage directions given in his text (in contrast to Shakespeare's) are very detailed and appear prescriptive, even if they are not intended to be.
L**3
Depends what you want.
This wasn't really what I was looking for, as I wanted more activities and games about A Midsummer Night's Dream but if you want a pre-edited and ready to go shortened script (probably for a school production) then it has done all the hard work for you for an ensemble of characters.
S**N
You can do better if you try
I got this because I was too lazy to edit the play for my drama group. I wish I had made more of an effort.
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