THEATRICAL BIRDS GET ROASTED

Let’s hear it for turkeys.

We have Thanksgiving at their expense. They will be roasted, stuffed, stewed, oiled, broiled, braised, barbecued, buttered, browned, glazed and gelatinized. Honored they will not be. So since one man’s holiday is another bird’s bummer, we’re picking up the lost cause and naming some thankless awards after the unthanked fowl.

This year, then, in no particular order, we are passing out bronzed and beribboned carcasses to the following:

--The Nederlanders for announcing and then canceling too many shows: “A Chorus Line” (announced for June at the Wilshire and then withdrawn); “La Cage aux Folles” (announced for the Wilshire, then the Pantages for September and withdrawn); the entire Playgoers’ Series at the Henry Fonda Theatre.

The latter--a presold three-play series announced for spring--took “a little longer” than anticipated to put together, according to the Nederlander’s Stan Seiden. But subscribers were not notified of the delay and refunds not so much offered as acceded to. Here it is fall and the series has yet to materialize. How long is “a little longer”?

--The Nederlanders, again, for advertising “Singin’ in the Rain” (opening at the Pantages Dec. 10) as coming “direct from Broadway” when, in fact, it had closed on Broadway and we’re getting the national company, assembled in Dallas, direct from San Francisco.

--The Nederlanders, a final time, for failing to advertise or otherwise inform the public (until forced into it by media agitation) that headliner Natalia Makarova was not playing the matinees of “On Your Toes,” offered in July on their Civic Light Opera season. Rebecca Wright was.

It took another couple of weeks for them to correct the program and acknowledge that Wright was, in fact, an alternate for Makarova, with regularly scheduled performances, and not just an understudy, with unscheduled ones.

--Actors’ Equity, for not helping the situation. When asked what the union was doing to correct the misrepresentation of Wright, Equity’s George Ives replied “nothing” because, as he put it, there had been “no complaints.”

By that definition there was no Holocaust. What is the function of an Equity deputy? On second thought, forget turkey. Make it an ostrich award for Ives.

--The Music Center Operating Co. for edging the Civic Light Opera out of the Music Center after 1987 by making its offer of a new contract virtually unacceptable. The new terms featured a cut in playing weeks from 16 to 12, making it impossible for shows to recoup their costs.

Eaton C. Ballard, chairman of the board of the operating company, attributed the slice to increasing demands for time at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion by its other tenants: the Philharmonic, the Joffrey Ballet and the new Music Center Opera. A curious decision in these days of shrunken dollars, since the Civic Light Opera--good, bad or indifferent--is the center’s only unsubsidized, rent-paying tenant. It prompted an angry CLO subscriber to accuse Ballard of “shooting himself in the foot.”

--The Shuberts as principal (and controling) producers of “Nicholas Nickleby.” After taking the trouble of bringing the magnificent 8 1/2-hour epic to the Ahmanson, they did very little with advertising to support its run.

When it became clear the box office was in trouble, they introduced a day-of-performance half-price ticket policy only to take it away 24 hours later. They also announced the making of a television commercial and revoked that a week later. But , in a flurry of last-minute magnanimity, they discounted all seats to the last performance of the second half of the show.

Too little too late. By half.

--The Shuberts, again, who, even putting three heads together, could not decide if they had or had not made money on “Cats” in Los Angeles, then chose to close the show Sunday--a month earlier than even they had expected.

This strongly suggests that they either did lose money or were about to start losing it, which is more or less what they said. Could they possibly be reaping what they sowed when they led the way in taking theater ticket prices to stratospheric new heights?

--T. Harding Jones and Steve Gideon, amateur producers of the hit “Nite Club Confidential,” who may single-handedly be setting Equity Waiver back 14 years. They edged out headliner Fay DeWitt when they wanted a “name” performer to pull in an audience at the Tiffany and hired comedienne Edie Adams to replace DeWitt.

When Adams proved less of a box-office draw than they’d hoped ( before the good reviews came in), they hired female impersonator Jim Bailey to replace Adams, neglecting to mention it to her.

Not satisfied with this accumulation of gaffes , Jones and Gideon put the second foot in the mouth by asking the critic if they could use a quote from the Adams review to promote Bailey’s Saturday arrival. To this pair of jokers we bequeath our Big Brass Gobbler award.

--The writer of this column who is sometimes wrong, answers her mail too late and, on occasion, will contort a sentence like a snake.

One such brought down the wrath of reader E. James Petersen of Fresno who took exception to the phrase (in the review of “Nite Club Confidential” with Edie Adams): “True that gone now is DeWitt’s show-stopping take-off of Edith Piaf . . . “ Peterson writes that “Truer yet (is) that certain phrases come not to the tongue trippingly. Possible that absent was the Saturday editor? Uncertain that malfunctioning was the word processor or hung-over was the author. Clear that gone now is simple straightforward writing.”

Which in mind puts us of the old phrase, “Throw the horse over the fence some hay.” Thanks is this writer giving and fishing gone.