Omnibus: "For all its goodies, it'll never be commercial," said an adman when Omnibus opened five years ago. Last week, as it began its first season without Ford Foundation support (and its first on NBC), Omnibus proved Madison Avenue more wrong than ever. With two-thirds of the show sold (to Aluminium Ltd. and Union Carbide), and the other third bid for, Omnibus kicked off with a slickly attractive white-shoe production of Stover at Yale, a tongue-in-dimpled-cheek musical adaptation by Douglass (Damn Yankees) Wallop of the old Owen Johnson stories. Much of the play lived up to Alistair Cooke's introduction of it as "a gentle thing, both odd and funny." When the boola overflowed with the fun of the Turkey trot, ragtime and jagtime at Mory's, and naughty dancing girls at lesser saloons, Stover came delightfully alive.
The new Omnibus, which Host Cooke dubs "a vaudeville show embracing several centuries," is large with what it likes to call its "mentortainment" plans: a detailed treatment of America's worsening traffic problem, a history of the bathtub with Bert Lahr, several Metropolitan Opera productions. For the second outing, this Sunday at 4 p.m. E.S.T., Omnibus will feature the first part of "American Trial by Jury" with Boston Barrister Joseph Welch and an "in-depth" look at LIFE.
Playhouse 90: Devoting a 90-minute play to a sympathetic view of a criminal's career is probably breaking new ground on TV and, as such, ought to be encouraged. Unfortunately, in the case of The Mystery of Thirteen, it proved cold, cold ground. David Shaw's version of Robert Graves' They Hanged My Saintly Billy recounted the actual career of an English rogue, gambler and forger named Dr. William Palmer, who was hanged in 1856 for what was rumored as his thirteenth murder by poison. Graves argued that Palmer was the victim of circumstantial evidence. Intentionally or not, the TV version left no doubt of his guilt, and it tried to mitigate Palmer's villainy with the charm of skilled Actor Jack Lemmon. All the Lemmon twists could not make palatable a character who genially blackmailed his loving mother while planning the death of his brother for the insurance. Lacking either the spoofing playfulness of Kind Hearts and Coronets or the intrigue of the Borgia capers, the play amounted to a catalogue of crime with little more dramatic point or development than the police blotter.