Murray Melvin

Planning a school or amateur Shakespeare production? 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 "story" of each play from start to finish while keeping the beauty of Shakespeare's language intact. Specific stage directions...

Based on one of the most controversial plays of its time, shows how a disaffected teenager finds her way amid the economic desperation of industrial Manchester, and despite an absent, self-absorbed mother. With its unapologetic identification with social outcasts and its sensitive, modern approach to matters of sexuality and race, a classic that is still a startling benchmark work of realism.

Based loosely on the memoirs of Shostakovich, a classical composer living in Russia during the reign of Stalin, this film traces the relationship between Shostakovich and Stalin and the effect that Stalin had on Shostakovich's life and work.