Kudos & Cholers

Festival of Music, telecast in color on NBC's go-minute Producer's Showcase, created enough pleasure last week to pose a question: Why doesn't it happen more often? For roughly $200,000, the price of four half-hour variety shows, Impresario Sol Hurok put some of music's brightest stars into dazzling constellation. The camera let the viewer hover over the fingers of Guitarist Andres Segovia and Pianist Artur Rubinstein, linger in closeup on the intense face of Marian Anderson, share the lilt of Verdi's La Traviata with Victoria de los Angeles, stand amid the powerful climax of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, superbly acted and sung by Bulgaria's Boris Christoff. Festival showed, far more eloquently than in its first edition ten months ago, that TV can add to music a certain intimate magic, and even some musical values not available in concert halls. There are probably millions of viewers who find the wait between such shows too long, and would be grateful for an occasional festival or semi-festival sprinkled through the year.

There was once a Chicago city editor who assembled his reporters and decreed: "What this newspaper needs is some new cliches." The same man, or someone just like him, is now roving through television as vice president in charge of promoting annual, trumped-up presentations of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. For the first of this season's versions, televised last week, the VP persuaded CBS and Chrysler's Shower of Stars to turn the durable old holiday cliche into elaborate but dismal humbug.

The adaptation was something Playwright Maxwell Anderson apparently dashed off on the back of an old theater program. Composer Bernard Herrmann contributed a few carols lacking either spirit or strength to presume on old standbys, and some solo songs (lyrics also by Anderson) that seemed saccharine even from Tiny Tim (Christopher Cook). Occasionally Fredric March as Scrooge showed some of his talent (as when he tried to wish away Marley's ghost as a case of indigestion), but for the most part, he seemed to be trying to caricature Scrooge Emeritus, the late Lionel Barrymore. The production was technically instructive for viewers interested in makeup techniques--the line dividing March's real nose from Scrooge's putty one was visible through most of the hour-long show--and the dinner table in the house of poor, starving Bob Cratchit (Bob Sweeney) was so laden with food that it needed only Henry VIII to waddle in and begin throwing haunches of venison to his hunting hounds.

Victor Borge, the happy Dane, comes to TV in his own show hardly more often than Christmas or the Festival of Music, and he is just as welcome. There are no comedians with Borge's talent for the piano, and no pianists with Borge's gift for comedy; moreover, with wit and fingers that are equally limber, he can travel first class in either company. In his second hour-long CBS appearance, Borge departed from his one-man show format, which earned him an 849-performance run on Broadway, to use a 42-piece orchestra --but he used it sparingly, and mostly as a collective straight man. On his own, Borge ran the comic gamut from a musician's parody of Bach to a mimic's spoof of Liberace ("Here is an opera Mozart composed for my mother"), keeping his timing uniformly impeccable in keyboard trills, one-line gags ("We have three children--one of each"), mugging, puns, audience squelchers, zany nonsequiturs and pure slapstick. The viewer's first impulse is to want to see Borge more often, but with TV's voracious way of chewing up and spewing out comedians and their material, the answer seems to be not more Borge, but more Borges.

John P. Marquand's Sincerely, Willis Wayde was not the best butter out of the churn of U.S. letters' smoothest old smoothy, but it was creamy enough to provide superior TV drama last week over CBS's Playhouse go (Thurs., 9:30-11:00 p.m.). Writer Frank D. Gilroy had the sense to stick close to Marquand's story, and the talent to weave many of the bland Marquand nuances of class and manner into a go-minute teleplay that had consistency, pace and believability. Good direction (by Vincent Done-hue) carried the story past Gilroy's occasional rough spots and got good performances out of a good cast. Sarah Churchill was a handsome, if not sufficiently Scott Fitzgeraldean, Bess Harcourt of the mill-owning Harcourts. Particularly when it came time to let the hypocrisy in his soul take over from the loyalty in his manner, Peter Lawford effectively carried Willis Wayde to his ultimate decision: if he could not have Bess, he would have her family mill. He got it.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.