Bardolatry

Currently starring in the hit revival of Twentieth Century, and best known for his stage & screen acting of Cyrano do Bergerac, 39-year-old Jose Ferrer remains a frustrated Shakespearean actor. His only Broadway appearance in Shakespeare was as sharply etched Iago to paul Robeson's 1943 Othello. This week, with Jose Ferrer Presents Shakespeare (Sun. 10 p.m.) over Manhattan's station WNEW, he got a zealot's chance to share his bardolatry with a wide audience.

Ferrer's show, aimed at listeners who were discourages in their youth by a "day and dusty classroom introduction to the master," offers a grab-bag variety of Shakespearean scenes, soliloquies, entire plays. For radio serial lovers, there is a four-installment version of Julius Caesar complete with synopses ("Amid the carnival-like entry of Caesar, the procession passes through the streets of Rome, leaving behind Brutus, who ponders Caesar's behavior, and Cassius, who waxes lean and hungry with petty resentment..."). Amatuer talent scouts had a chance to vote for the best of three recorded Hamlets (John Gielgud, Maurice Evans, John Barrymore). As a change of pace, Ferrer promises readings from Shakespeare's sonnetts by Gielgud, Basil Rathbone, Dame Edith Evans, as well as his own interpretations of roles from Othello and Romeo and Juliet. To close his lively half-hour with a Shakespearean flourish, Puerto Rican-born Actor Ferrer took some liberties with lines from Richard II:

Farewell! If heart's presages be not vain . . .

We here part, but shall meet again."

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