The Week in Review

TV last week showed early foot, then fell off the pace, finally closed strong. It was away from the post with The Taming of the Shrew, a brisk Shakespearean gallop which showed Maurice Evans at the top of his form as the impetuous Petruchio. while Lilli Palmer gave smouldering life to the imperious Kate. Staged with wit and imagination by The Hit Parade's William Nichols and costumed brilliantly by Rouben Ter-Arutunian, Shrew was one of the best of Maurice Evans' productions.

ABC lapsed from its usual pattern of filmed shows to try a live hour-long Spectacular, Springtime, U.S.A. It is a Broadway truism that Helen Hayes is so gifted that she could even make the reading of the Manhattan phone book an exciting experience. ABC confounded Broadway and Helen by handing her a script as heavy as the phone book and twice as dull.

A flag-waving salute to America past and present. Springtime was also bedeviled by flubs, as when the actor playing George Washington proudly announced the surrender of "Cromwell'' at Yorktown. For music lovers willing to ignore the script, there was some reward in the singing of Patrice Munsel and Rise Stevens and in Paul Whiteman's conducting of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

Armstrong Circle Theater created some excitement with Five Who Shook the Mighty, a sympathetic rendering of last year's capture of the Red Rumanian legation in Bern. Switzerland, by a band of anti-Communist exiles. Although taking considerable dramatic license with the facts (e.g., the Red charge d'affaires, played by Gregory Morton, is shown as a captive, but actually escaped), the play had far more realism and bite than the usual run of TV's anti-Communist dramas. Climax! failed with its version of Katherine Anne Porter's 1939 novel. Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a story of love and loss in World War I. Dorothy McGuire, looking at moments remarkably like Grace Kelly, flung herself into the role of the lovelorn girl with more abandon than heartbreak, and John Forsythe as her man had the air of a man looking desperately for the nearest exit.

On Sunday things picked up again with a battery of good shows. Camera Three dealt sensitively with the imagist poetry of Dylan Thomas; Omnibus approached the end of its best TV season with a technically superb visit to Harvard University that featured a strong supporting cast of such alumni as Massachusetts' U.S. Senators Leverett Saltonstall and John Kennedy, Johns Hopkins' Vice President Dr. Barry Wood, and Composer Leonard Bernstein. Later Max Liebman contributed another of his spectaculars, Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl: it had a fine satiric idea (U.S. career girls, past and present), a talented cast (Bert Lahr, Nancy Walker, Helen Gallagher, Tammy Grimes. Janet Blair) but an often hackneyed script.

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