BROKEN HEEL SLOWS UP ‘COYOTE CYCLE’

If you’re going to fall out of a tree, watch how you do it. Darrell Larson did it right for years, but Friday, during the opening sequence of the first play in Murray Mednick’s seven-play “Coyote Cycle” at the Paramount Ranch, he did it wrong.

Larson misjudged his fall, fracturing his heel. This didn’t stop the performance. Ignoring pain, he went on with plays two and three, even though he had to be carried from site to site. By the next day, however, it was clear he couldn’t go on. Doctors concurred. Larson, who was playing the title role, is out and Matthew Goulish, an actor/playwright who’d been stage-managing the show, is in.

This has necessitated scheduling changes. Canceled is Saturday’s “all-nighter” when all seven plays were to be staged in a dawn-to-dusk marathon. Instead, plays one-to-four will be done, beginning at 7:30 p.m., followed Sunday by plays five-to-seven (8:30 p.m.). The first all-nighter will now take place Aug. 3, with another tentatively scheduled for Aug. 11, if “Cycle” extends. Call 827-0808 for the latest information--and directions to the ranch.

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH: There are unhappy people out there. One of them is Helen Amestoy, who was more than a little distressed to find she was holding tickets to the Aug. 20 performance of “My One and Only,” when the show was closing Aug. 18. When she checked with the Music Center box office, she was told a decision would be made Sunday about extending and that, if she wanted a refund, she could send in her tickets.

“I am furious,” Amestoy predictably wrote Stage Watch. “After the fiasco last summer of the Metropolitan Opera in which I lost $80 (the “Aida” performance scheduled then canceled at the Shrine and the ensuing shambles), I am sensitive to misrepresentation.”

Was there misrepresentation?

“One and Only” producer Barry Weissler claimed ignorance of the situation. Company manager Drew Murphy, claimed only error.

“Initially, there was no plan to extend,” Murphy explained Tuesday. “What happened is that the box office had programmed an additional week by mistake and about $2,000 worth of tickets were sold for that week. The box office couldn’t do anything about people who had walked up to buy tickets, but they tried to contact everyone who had written in.”

Everyone but Helen Amestoy, who had ordered--and received--her tickets via a mailer that had included the wrong date.

“No one called me,” she confirmed over the phone Tuesday, “and I thought their handling of my inquiry was very cavalier.”

As for Weissler, “That is not my box office,” he said from New York. “I can’t control what they do. I am not aware of this. Why on earth would I take out expensive ads with a closing date of Aug. 18 and sell tickets beyond it?”

Beats us, too, but someone sent the mailer and it wasn’t the Music Center, according to a puzzled Alan Coleman of the Music Center Operating Co., booker of the show and keeper of the box office.

“I am very, very sorry about this,” Weissler added. “We had had no plans to extend, but as it turns out we are extending--four, maybe five weeks. I’d like to do anything I can to right the situation.”

Done, since Amestoy gets to use her tickets after all, now that the show will stay in town.

S’wonderful, but a word to the wise: If you’re thinking of buying tickets between Sept. 15 and 22, make sure producers, presenters, box office and company managers agree the show will be around.

CALLBOARD: “Tongues,” the extraordinary Sam Shepard word/body one-man play made indelible on stage by actor Joseph Chaikin, will be featured Monday (KCET Channel 28 at 11 p.m.) on “Alive From Off Center.”

The only other full half-hour stage feature in this series, devoted chiefly to video and performance art, is an encounter with monologist Spalding Gray (Aug. 12).

--Pomona College professor Leonard Pronko, our eminent Kabuki artist and authority on the West Coast, will offer a lecture/demonstration Saturday, 2 p.m., at the Japan America Theatre, in anticipation of the Aug. 7 arrival of Japan’s Grand Kabuki. Reservations: (213) 680-3700.

--”Ship Shapes” is going in style. The company voted to give a final performance Sunday to benefit the AIDS Project Los Angeles.

The Beverly Hills Playhouse donated the theater. A champagne reception precedes the show at 7:30 p.m. Curtain’s at 8. Tickets are $20 (213-652-3366).

THE RUMOR MILL: Is it true that “Chapin,” the revue of songs by the late Harry C., produced by Joe Stern at the Improvisation in 1977, is being brought back to its home town (after successes in Chicago and New York) by Susan Dietz and Peg Yorkin?

“We’re working on it,” Dietz said Tuesday. “If we succeed, it’ll be in October and probably in Hollywood (at the L.A. Stage Co.).”

Meanwhile, the Dietz/Yorkin partnership has reopened John Bunzel’s “Delirious,” as promised, at the Matrix--and that’s no rumor.

LAUGHLINES: We were under the delusion that Equity Waiver was a workshop affair and a steppingstone to things bigger and better. Now a press release from the Nightlights Players sets us straight. Nightlights is mounting a workshop production (opening Friday) of “Blind Faith,” a pop-opera dealing with the church/state issue that the authors--Evans Cooper and LeRoy Dysart--hope will be “a steppingstone to an Equity Waiver house.”

You live and you learn.