Reduced Shakespeare Company

The Reduced Shakespeare Company is an American comedy group, who specialise in taking vast bodies of work, that would take days to see in their entirety, whittling them down to the bare essentials, then whittling them down a bit further and filling the gaps with jokes.

Their members can be blamed for producing these plays:

• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)
• The Complete History of America (abridged)
• The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged)
• The Complete Millennium Musical (abridged)
• All the Great Books (abridged)
• Completely Hollywood (abridged)
• The Complete World of Sports (abridged)
• Star Wars Shortened
• Lost Reduced - Covers the first five seasons, and was televised before the sixth season premier.
• The Ring Reduced - Televised as part of Channel 4's Richard Wagner season.

They also made The Reduced Shakespeare Radio Show for The BBC World Service, which was The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) reformatted into six half-hour radio episodes. Although not strictly RSC shows, founder Adam Long made four Reduced-style quarter-hour shows for BBC Radio 4 about British politics under the title The Condensed History of... (the three main parties and Big Ben).