Sixty-Minute Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing (The Sixty-Minute Shakespeare Series)

Cass Foster's version of Shakespeare's popular comedy has all the right ingredients for staging "Much Ado" with high school students. He edits the text to eliminate much of the parallel speech while retaining the brightest of the lines. Shakespeare's many metaphors and images, though brilliant, can tend to confuse the average audience. Foster's script loses none of the important lines or images, and none of the audience members either, as he culls the text to focus on important action and interaction in the play. Also offering definitions of archaic Elizabethan words and ample space for director's notes, this script gets two thumbs up.

Reviewed By: Aaron Garrett, Eclectic Homeschool Online This is an abridged version of Shakespeare's play, Much Ado About Nothing, designed so that you can read through it fairly quickly and so that it can be performed in a shorter period of time than Shakespeare's original version. This is indicated by the series name, Sixty-Minute Shakespeare. The play begins with several men coming back from a war, and Count Claudio and Lord Benedick find that they are in love with the daughter (Hero) and niece (Beatrice) of governor Leonato. The play unfolds as evil Don John tries to destroy their love. Cass Foster has done a wonderful job editing the play to be short enough to read it casually, but long enough to keep all the important details. Foster has also made it easy to use the book as a script to guide a director and cast in producing the play. Features that assist in this include a complete detail of the cast before the play starts, a spot at the end of each act for the actors/director to take notes, definitions of Old English terms, and ideas on how to perfect the play with tips on scenery and pacing. If you want an overview of a particular Shakespeare play, but don't have the time to read it, or if you are looking for a good script for a class play, I would definitely pick this and the other abridged versions in this series.

I facilitate a mother/daughter book group, fifth and sixth graders and thier moms. We decided to do a play read this year and, after looking at the offerings under children's theater (boring, trite, tired), we decided to tackle Shakespeare. At first I tried cutting the play down myself, but this is much harder than you'd think! I was delighted when I ran across Cass Foster's series. It's not dumbed down, it uses the original language and has excellent vocabulary helps. Of course the girls didn't get everything that was going on in the play when they read it at home, but when we got together for the reading, it went fantastically well and now they've had a positive introduction to Shakespear. We will be buying another set of 60 minute Shakespeare books for next year

The book is very interesting, much like other from Shekspeare. The story of two cuples gettig maried is very old. But the way the two cuples fall in love is very new and refreshing. This work has the characters of drama as well as those of drama. This book falls in to chategory of must read it!