Midsummer Day's Dream

Jeremy Irons Hosts the Five-Part Working Shakespeare Educational DVD Series of Historic Shakespeare Workshops Conducted by the Royal Shakespeare Company's Legendary Voice and Speech Teacher Cicely Berry. Twenty actors from both sides of the Atlantic, most of whom had never met before, convened in New York for three days of intensive Shakespeare training workshops. The group, which included Emily Watson, Helen Hunt, Samuel L. Jackson, Victor Garber, Blythe Danner, Lindsay Duncan, Toby Stephens, Claire Danes, Cherry Jones, Tony Goldwyn, and Robert Sean Leonard, didn't sign up to demonstrate "how to" perform Shakespeare for the general edification of the theatre-going public.

It's a bit depressing how many new releases from the "major" classical labels these days consist of recycled old recordings, but give Deutsche Grammophon credit for the thinking that obviously went into this four-CD box entitled The Four Seasons: A Musical Calendar of Favourite Classics. In a way, this is yet another milking of the perennially salable Vivaldi Four Seasons; each of the four discs (Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter) opens with a complete performance of its respective concerto from that set, in the Gil Shaham recording with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.

Classics Illustrated were comic book adaptations from classic literature, a series that Russian-born Albert Lewis Kanter (1897-1973) began in 1941 for Elliot Publishing. Introduced under the heading Classic Comics, the series started October, 1941, with a 64-page adaptation of Alexandre Dumas‘ , followed by and . With the fourth issue, The Last of the Mohicans, Kanter began his own Gilberton Publications. The first 12 issues had 64 pages, but wartime paper shortages forced Kanter to reduce each issue to 56 pages. In 1947, after the first 34 issues, Kanter changed the title from Classic Comics to Classics Illustrated, a logo with a high visibility over the next 15 years because Kanter, unlike other comic book publishers, kept his titles in print, going back to press with occasional reprintings. --