Review

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.

Studio One: Psychiatric gimmicks have become such glib cliches on TV, as in most modern fiction, that writers are too often exposed with" their own craft ebbing. Last week The Deaf Heart performed the rare feat of tackling a psychiatric subject with freshness and a driving sense of drama that never marred its authenticity. Based on an actual case in Minneapolis, it was the story of a girl who went psychosomatically deaf in emotional flight from her role as the ears of a deaf father, mother and brother. It unfolded like a mystery story, beginning with the girl's arrival at a hospital psychiatric ward, developing as the staff ferreted out the causes of her malady, reaching a high pitch of suspense with an attempt to make her hear again through the ingenious use of a lie detector and the shock of an emotional confrontation. Under Sidney (Twelve Angry Men) Lumet's direction, the play combined compassion and extraordinary visual impact in scenes in which the mute father and mother flung their feelings into sign language--taught to the actors by a specialist--and the brother (well-played by Richard Shepard) vented his own anxieties with the laborious croak and articulating grimaces of a man who has never heard his own voice. In the girl's part, Piper Laurie showed again, as she did in an uneven Playhouse 90 show last season, that Hollywood has wasted a first-rate actress as a B-picture harem houri. The Deaf Heart belongs to the handful of TV dramas that deserve to be repeated. Beyond that it holds added promise: it is the first solo effort on commercial TV by Chicago-born Mayo Simon, 29. He is a welcome addition to the depleted company of talented television playwrights.

Cosmic Rays: For his third show in the Bell System's science series (Our Mr. Sun, Hemo the Magnificent), Producer-Director Frank Capra again trotted out entertainment as the handmaiden of education. Before a panel of Dostoevsky, Dickens and Poe, played by Bil Baird puppets, Dr. Research (Dr. Frank Baxter) and Actor Richard Carlson submitted their scientific candidate for a detective-story prize. Between fancy patter with the panel, the pair used film, animated cartoons and laboratory models to show how the sleuths of science discovered, clue by clue, what little is known about the cosmic rays that bombard the earth. The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays was an instructive hour, much less vulgar in its popularization than Hemo the Magnificent, but it could have done with less sugar-coating ("These science dicks will knock ya for a loop!"), even for the sweet tooth of the bubble-gum brigade.

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