The Week in Review

Like a summer bride, television last week decked itself in something old, something new and something borrowed. There was even something blue (see below).

The old item was Shakespeare's dependable Julius Caesar, done for the third time in six years by CBS's Studio One. Quite a lot was wrong with this production: Brutus (Philip Bourneuf) was too short, Cassius (Shepperd Strudwick) too wholesome, Mark Antony (Alfred Ryder) too boyish. Yet for all its imbalance, it was entertaining. Producer Alex March, faced with the insuperable job of cramming the 2 1/2-hour play into the allotted 54 minutes, used a single set, concentrated on closeups, and apparently aimed at the style of the recitative. Speeches were delivered with ringing clarity, and Shakespeare's vivid imagery made up for the TV version's many lacks. Theodore Bikel's fat Caesar was rich in pomposity and human infirmity. A nice scene showed him eagerly cupping his deaf ear to catch each glowing word of flattery from the conspirator luring him to his death.

Newness was supplied by It's Magic (Sun. 7 p.m., CBS), a show certain to wow children and win more than indulgent approval from their parents. Headed by Paul Tripp. who created the excellent Mr. I. Magination in 1949, It's Magic devotes a swift-paced half hour to the Black Arts. Gali Gali, a sleight-of-hand Egyptian, displayed a witty routine involving empty eggcups and a small barnyard of baby chicks; three attractively inept dancers with the help of a black backdrop and black-garbed assistants suavely defied gravity; Dominique, a French pickpocket, took a spectator's shirt from his back without his knowing it.

The borrowing was on Climax!, whose One Night Stand was a derivative howl from the hot jazz nights of the 1930s. Obeying the Musician's Law in dramatic writing (as immutable as the Newsman's Law, which requires a press card in every hat), the story was, of course, a tearjerker: a talented jazz pianist discovers that he has tuberculosis but wants to die beating out his rhythms in cellar joints instead of getting cured in a nice, clean sanatorium. The novelty lay in the fact that Bob Crosby and his Bobcats not only played their instruments but also tried to be players. What was gained in verisimilitude was lost in the wooden-Indian school of acting: Crosby, in particular, delivered each line with a granite impassivity that Ed Sullivan might have envied. John Forsythe agonized as the dying piano player, and Actor Donald Buka gave the show a fine shot in the arm as a real gone musician who seemed right in the Bix Beiderbecke tradition.

The week's most effective show was straight from real life: an interview with Pablo Casals, the world's greatest cellist. In Prades, France, where Casals has lived in self-imposed exile from Franco Spain since the end of the civil war, the 78-year-old artist played two selections on the cello for another in NBC's Wise Men series. The fascinating part of the film, produced by Robert Graff, was the man rather than the musician. Out of the conversation, Casals' personality rose cleanly, buttressed by the serenity of a man who lives by his convictions.

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