OCTOBER 1996 ----------------------------In this issue------------------------------------------ Voices in Contemporary Theatre: Key West Theatre Festival Rubin's Corner: A Definition of Broadway The Play's the Thing: Sam Shepard - Two Wrongs Don't Make a (playw)Right What's New in the Forum, TRE Trivia, Gossip Tidbit du jour ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Voices at the Key West Theatre Festival Many communities have theatre-festivals of one type or another; not all are as ideally situated for the purpose as Key West. This island of about 22,000 residents boasts no fewer than 4 theatres and a history peppered with such literary luminaries as Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams. It's an affluent community who's primary business is tourism. Its climate is so perfect in October you realize why songwriters like Jimmy Buffet who should know better attempt the impossible and try to describe weather. The residents even have a reputation for tolerance of ideas and lifestyles and support of the arts. If there is a perfect environment in which to grow and display theatrical entertainment, this is it. One must wonder then why the festival is so small , with only 4 fully-staged productions and 6 readings over 10 days, and obscure, even on the island comparatively few residents seem to know about it. There is no acknowledgment of the Island by the festival -- while the evening shows at the Waterfront Playhouse began immediately after the ritual Sunset Celebration at Mallory Square. So why not toss a little flyer in with those tickets telling visitors about the celebration, its proximity, and the fact that the curtain would be held (as it was) for the sunsetters to take their seats. There is a reciprocal lack-of-acknowledgment by the Island. Where are all the traditional tie-ins with the bars & restaurants adjacent to the performing venues. Very few strangers in a community view these as commercial and intrusive - they're welcome hints at what establishments are convenient to the theatre, & prepared to offer an early before-show dinner or are open late-night for an after-show dessert & coffee. There is also curious lack of the social-side of a festival of this type. Oh, there's an opening gala and closing night party - attended exclusively by the festival actors - with no visible community participation at all - and a "meet the playwrights" party - held the Saturday before the readings - circumstances under which novice writers are not at their best. But compare these with the less advantageously situated Orlando Fringe - a host booth serves as greenroom/hangout for virtually all festival performers, who mix and socialize and see each others shows throughout the festival and create not merely an atmosphere, but a presence in the city. The artists also attend the official parties, but these are more for community-artist interaction, not inter-artist mixers. While Key West uses only 3 of its 4 regular theatres to stage 4 shows, Orlando improvises extra performance spaces in storefronts and with a little planning a festival-attendee can easily see 7 or 8 shows in a day. And as for community awareness - the Orlando festival devised a brilliant strategy of giving change in silver dollars & two-dollar bills whenever possible - all the merchants nearby know exactly how much business the festival brings in their doors. It also decks out the venues in oversized balloons - which, while not aesthetically pleasing, makes it difficult for a resident to remain ignorant that SOMETHING is going on next door. That about covers my response to the "festival" apart from the actual theatres and plays. The theatres themselves are charming. The island houses 4: The Waterfront Playhouse is probably the most interesting - the approximately 150 seat proscenium maintains the bare stone walls that remind one it was built as an ice-storage warehouse in the 1880s. It normally houses a short season of popular & secondstage plays & musicals from Carousel to Me & Betty Davis. The Red Barn , an even smaller proscenium-stage restored from an old carriage house off Duval Street, is a community theatre with a season of such diverse material such as Always...Patsy Cline, Sylvia, & Food Chain. Eaton Street Playhouse is the town chameleon, alternately a proscenium-stage with cabaret seating, and discotheque nightclub. Finally the Tennessee Williams Fine Arts Center, which remained dark throughout the festival, is a 500-seat presenting house which brings in mostly music (Amadeus Trio Chamber Music) , the occasional touring musical, and productions from the island's Community College theatre department. The actual theatre is less endearing. The festival's best effort was Waterboy, a two-character lampoon which calls itself a satire of corporate mentality, but is too outrageous to be offensive to those who don't subscribe to the "business=bad" mentality . Playwright Rich Orloff clearly has a talent for brisk Mamet-like dialogue & pace, and a biting absurdist wit. Equally clearly, he didn't have a clue how to end this piece and Act II meanders too long before winding down and admitting defeat. Actors Mike Alpern & John B. Good were adequate in their roles, but seldom rose above that level. This Mameteque material makes heavy demands on its cast and cannot survive the loss of momentum when Good goes up or when Alpern delivers a line written "But..." as that one syllable, complete with ellipse, then politely waits to be interrupted. Nevertheless Good and Alpern are among the best of the local performers. Iris Eyes, despite the heroic efforts of guest artists Guiesseppe Jones and Jack Ryland, is easily the worst of the festival. Transplanting the Greek Tragedy Agamemnon into the aftermath of the Civil War may sound like an inspired idea, but Sharr White's adaptation is as pretentious and hollow as the leading actress Conni Atkins is stilted and superficial. The playwright may have simply stuck too closely to the source material - relying on freeze monologues to tell what should be shown a la a traditional Greek chorus, but I think the flaws go deeper. The subplots reek of cliché and the focus drifts from this character to that without any anchor of who's story is being told or what it all means. Someone on the play-reading committee owes us all an apology for this one. Denny's Chronicles, offers a pleasant but short "bottomless cup of angst" from a teenage playwright acted by a talented teenage company from the New World School of Arts in Miami. Writer Alana Macias needs to hone her craft a little more before she attempts to tackle the grandiose themes of life, death, and love, but there are glimmers of a real talent here. "Write what you know" is a cliché and a myth, but there is no doubt that the story presented here - of a high school friendship that has maybe started to develop into a romance - the spectre of separation in the form of one party going to an out-of-state college - these things ring true for us in the audience and clearly for the cast as well. Far more so than the play which is "threatened" in the promotional material of a "surreal multi-dimensional reality in which past, present and future exist at the same time" Fortunately that's not at all what the play presents - True Clare, the student going out-of-state accuses John, the maybe boyfriend of never writing and cheating on her, etc. when she hasn't even left yet. But this is treated by both actors (Kei Berlin and Doug Diamond) as merely "feminine logic" and it works very well. The rest of the young cast is a little uneven, but overall very solid - Enrique Hecker as the Paco perhaps stands out as the waiter in a 24-hour Denny's - he certainly has the most to work with in comedic setup. His best foils, the - well, for lack of better description, - "gothic lesbians" Erica Boynton and Christie Strong perhaps don't understand that they merely present the setup for Paco's reaction, which is the joke. Patrice Bailey's direction does not make the most of this writing, nor does it always guide the actors wisely, but overall, it's a good show from a promising group of young people. Exploding Love, despite trite writing devoid of any purpose other than the cheap laugh of the prime-time sitcom, makes for an enjoyable evening - although again, it's a very short show - thanks to a first-rate cast that go all out in this silly tale about a man who breaks into a courthouse men's room wired with explosives in order to stop his ex-wife's remarriage. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Play's the Thing Sam Shepard: Two Wrongs Make a (playw)right Have you ever tried forcing the wrong ends of two magnets together? So much resistance builds up that the magnets struggle to be apart. No amount of force can join these opposite poles. But imagine the power that could be harnessed if you could accomplish this, much like the scientists conducting experiments with superconductors. Sam Shepard has made a career out of forcing opposite ends of characters together. The audience gets to watch as these characters struggle to be free of each other or the circumstances that bind them. Such energy is created that the explosion of emotion rips the stage wide open. In Shepard's world of the stage, forcing together two wrongs is absolutely right. Samuel Shepard Rogers VII was in Illinois but was raised on a ranch in Southern California. By the 1960's, Shepard's "off-off" Broadway plays revealed him as the voice of his generation. Going against the traditions of American theater, Shepard wrote about the symbolic icons of his youth: cowboys, rock stars, antiheroes and cars. In the introduction to Shepard's Seven Plays Richard Gilman recalls Sam referring to his youth as, ". . .a life resembling that in the movie American Graffiti, only tougher, shrewder, more seeded with intimations of catastrophe in the midst of swagger." The emerging rock music that sprang up around the car culture of his teenage years impacted Shepard. His love of rock music and musicians creeps into his plays, especially in Suicide in bFlat and The Tooth of Crime. Shepard peppered his plays with music from all genres from jazz to country and western. Gilman went on to say that Shepard himself has claimed that, ". . .these musical elements are as important to many of his plays as their speech, and that the same thing is true of his decors." Shepard's first "rock and roll" play was written in 1971 with singer Patti Smith. Cowboy Mouth was the anthem of youth seeking a hero to guide them who was, ``a rock ' n' roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth.'' Shepard followed this up with The Tooth of Crime (1972), an imaginative rock-talk opera in which the world of rock music becomes organized, much like Mafia style crime families, and fighting is done with body language and jive. The fights are "style" wars. This "talk" opera features an interesting blend of speech patterns, mixing in rock, gangster, car and cowboy jargon: HOSS: So you gambled your measly grub stake for a showdown with the champ. Ain't that pathetic. I said that before and I'll say it again. Pathetic. (CROW is getting nervous. He feels he's losing the match. He tries to force himself into the walk. He chews more desperately and twirls the chain faster.) You young guns comin' up out' prairie stock and readin' dime novels over breakfast. Drippin' hot chocolate down yer zipper. Pathetic. CROW: Time warps don't shift the purpose, just the style. You're clickin' door handles now. There'll be more paint on your side than mine. HOSS: We'd drag you through the street fer a nickel. Naw. Wouldn't even waste the horse. Just break yer legs and leave ya' fer dog meat. Shepard's plays ventured in a new direction during the 1970's as he began to explore the world of domestic dysfunctionality. Plays like Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, True West, Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind pit family members against each other in conflicts that are at times reminiscent of the duels of the old west. In each case, there is an inherent domestic complication of families degenerating driving the story forward. The language is gritty and shocking. For Shepard, no issue was beyond the boundaries of exploration. The subject matter, like the incest issues of Buried Child and Fool for Love, shocked many early audiences. Curse of the Starving Class (1976) takes place on a small, run-down ranch in California. Ella's husband drunken husband tried to break into the house the night before and, fearing for her life, she called the police. During the incident her husband ripped the screen door off the hinges. Her son Wesley is angry that she called the police. In a monologue Wesley recounts the events of the night before: WESLEY: . . .Wood splitting. Man's voice. In the night. Foot kicking hard through door. One foot right through door. Bottle crashing. Glass breaking. Fist through door. Man cursing. Man going insane. Feet and hands tearing. Head smashing. Man yelling. shoulder smashing. Whole body crashing. Woman screaming. Mom screaming. Mom screaming for police. . . . Wheels screaming off down hill. Packard disappearing. Sound disappearing. No sound. No sight. Planes still hanging. Hearts still pounding. No sound. Mom crying. Soft crying. Then no sound. Then soft crying. . . . Then far off the freeway could be heard. Emma, Wesley's sister, always talks of running away. She can't wait to be free of the house and the family. Ella has decided to sell the family house and land, without her husband knowing. She also can't wait to be free to live her own life and have some money for her own. Even Weston, the family patriarch, can't stay on the land. he leaves the family all the time and has let the ranch become run-down. Wesley is the only one who seems to want to stay put. He works the land and cares for the sheep on the ranch. Before long Ella is running around with the slick lawyer who she has hired to help her get the land. At the same time Weston, her husband, has sold the land to cover debts he has run up around town. When Wesley tells Ella what her husband has done she knows doom is around the corner. The cycle is never-ending. ELLA: Do you know what this is? It's a curse. I can feel it. It's invisible but it's there. It's always there. It comes onto us like nighttime. Every day I can feel it. Every day I can see it coming. And it always comes. Repeats itself. It comes even when you do everything to stop it from coming. Even when you try to change it. And it goes back. . . .It goes forward too. We spread it. We pass it on. We inherit it and pass it down, and then pass it down again. It goes on and on like that without us. The man who bought the property shows up to claim the land and finds out Ella sold it too. He gets the money he gave Weston back, the money intended to pay off the people who are after him. Wesley, dressed in Wesson's clothes is beating by the men who are after his father. Emma is thrown in jail for shooting up the bar of the man who bought the property from Weston. Weston runs off to Mexico. Emma runs away, vowing to become a criminal. Ella and Wesley are left alone, to face whatever is left of life. In 1979 Shepard wrote Buried Child, the play that won him a Pulitzer Prize. Gary Sinise directed Shepard's revision of the play in October 1995 at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater. The revised version also opened on Broadway in April of 1996, marking the first time a play by Sam Shepard ever played on a Broadway stage. In a recent interview in American Theatre, Sam Shepard told Stephanie Coen, Shepard talked about the most noticeable revised element of the play, that Tilden fathered the "buried child". Shepard said: It was always implicated that he was, even in the original. I didn't want anything in the play to be gratuitously mysterious. And I felt that certain questions that were ignited in the play should fine -- not resolution, they shouldn't be resolved -- but they should be at least followed through. One of them was this insinuation that Tilden was the father. and I thought, yes, of course, he is, go with that. Buried Child opens with Dodge, a sickly old drunk, sitting on the couch, watching t.v. and coughing louder and louder. Halie, his wife started yelling at him from upstairs to take his medicine. They soon begin arguing, which seems to be their only way of communication. She tells Dodge that Bradley, one of their sons, is coming to cut his hair. Dodge gets angry because Bradley left him "near bald" the last time he cut his hair. Soon Tilden, another of their sons, comes in with an armful of corn and tells Dodge he picked it behind the house. Dodge tells him it has been thirty-five years since he planted corn back there. Tilden then drops the corn in Dodge's lap, to prove he had the corn. Halie finally appears at the top of the stairs. She begins to talk about Tilden's drinking and how he turned out no good. She then talks about Bradley who lost his leg. Finally she brings up Ansel, who she thought was the smartest of her sons. Halie tells that instead of dying in battle, Ansel dies in a motel room. Halie argues with Tilden about the corn all over the place, and then leaves to meet Father Dewis for lunch. Vince, Tilden's son, and his girlfriend Shelly arrive at the family home. No one recognizes Vince. Vince is surprised to find his father there, since he thought Tilden was living in New Mexico. Tilden reappears with carrots this time. Shelly becomes upset that no one seems to know Vince. She questions Tilden. SHELLY (Pointing to Vince): This is supposed to be your son! Is he your son? Do you recognize him? I'm just along for the ride here. I thought everybody knew each other! Tilden stares at Vince. Dodge wraps himself up in the blanket and sits on sofa staring at the floor. TILDEN: I had a son once but we buried him. Dodge quickly looks at Tilden. Shelly looks to Vince. DODGE: You shut up about that! You don't know anything about that! After Dodge sends Vince for some whiskey, Bradley, the mean-spirited son, comes in and sees Shelly. He asks if she is going to take Tilden away. He begins to tease Tilden who quickly runs off. When Shelly asks him to help Dodge, who is getting sicker, Bradley suggests they shoot him, ". . .Put him out of his misery." When Shelly tells him to shut up, Bradley tells her not to talk to him that way. He says that he took that from Dodge and others but that now he is the one in control. He then orders Shelly to open her mouth, and in a symbolic rape, he puts his fingers in her mouth, makes her stand there frozen for a moment, then removes his fingers. After Halie returns with Father Dewis, things in the house start to come apart. Shelly has picked up, through her conversations with Dodge that a secret is looming over the family. When Dodge starts to tell the story, Halie protests, but he continues on. He tells how Halie got pregnant, even when they were not sleeping together. He made her have the child without a doctor present. He says: DODGE: . . . It lived. It wanted to grow up in this family. It wanted to be just like us. It wanted to be part of us. It wanted to pretend that I was its father. She wanted me to believe in it. Even when everyone around us knew. Everyone. All ours boys knew. Tilden knew. Dodge talks about how Tilden would walk the baby and talk to it, even though the child couldn't understand anything. He could not let this "mistake" continue to grow up. Dodge tells Shelly, "I killed it. I drowned it. Just like the runt of a litter. Just drowned it. There was no struggle. No noise. Life just left it." Halie continues to say that Dodge is lying. Vince comes back, very drunk on the booze meant for Dodge. He stands outside the door shouting for everyone to stay away. He takes a knife out and begins to cut a whole in the screen door. About that time, Dodge tells Vince that he can have the house. He claims to be dying so he wills the house to Vince. Shelly, fed up with the craziness, tells Vince she is leaving. Vince refuses to go since, "I just inherited a house. I've finally been recognized. Didn't you hear?" Vince soon checks on Dodge, who has dies quietly. He covers Dodge with a blanket and puts on his grandfather's ball cap. Halie is upstairs, talking to Dodge as she was in the opening. She doesn't even realize he is dead. Tilden enters carrying the corpse of a small child. He looks at the dead child, which is now bones and muddy rags, and he slowly climbs the stairs. Sam Shepard's plays speak of the dark secrets in our lives which have been hidden from the world. He digs at the truth inside us. At times it may be painful to watch but in the end that same truth frees us. We can look at who we are and the ghosts that haunt us. And like those two opposite ends of the magnet, we are pushed apart from what opposes us. By the end of the play Shepard turns the magnets around and we become attracted to that which joins us -- similar histories that we all share. Bibliography of Sam Shepard's Plays 1964 Cowboys The Rock Garden 1965 Up to Thursday Dog Rocking Chair Chicago (Obie) Icarus's Mother (Obie) 4-h Club 1966 Fourteen Hundred Thousand Red Cross (Obie) 1967 La Turista (Obie) Forensic and the Navigators (Obie) Cowboys #2 Melodrama Play 1969 The Holy Ghostly (on tour) The Unseen Hand Fourteen Hundred Thousand (teleplay) 1970 Operation Sidewinder Shaved Splits 1971 Mad Dog Blues Back Bog Beast Bait Cowboy Mouth (also actor) 1972 The Tooth of the Crime 1973 Blue Bitch Nightwalk 1974 Geography of a Horse Dreamer Little Ocean, Action (Obie) 1975 Killer's Head 1976 Angel City, Suicide in B Flat The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife Buried Child (Obie 1976) 1977 Inacoma Curse of the Starving Class (Obie) 1978 Seduced Buried Child (Pulitzer Prize 1979) Tongues 1979 Savage/Love 1980 Jackson's Dance True West (Obie 1985) 1981 Superstitions 1981 Fool for Love (Obie) 1983 1985 A Lie of the Mind 1989 Hawk Moon 1991 States of Shock 1995 Simpatico Play Collections 1967 Five Plays 1971 The Unseen Hand and Other Plays Mad Dog Blues and Other Plays 1973 Hawk Moon: A Book of Short Stories, Poems, and Monologues 1976 Angel City and Other Plays 1977 Rolling Thunder Logbook 1979 Buried Child and Other Plays 1980 Four Two-Act Plays 1981 Seven Plays 1982 Motel Chronicles 1984 Fool for Love and Other Plays 1989 Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard: Letters and Texts 1972-1984 WEB SITES ON SAM SHEPARD http://www.mrshowbiz/index.html http://www.mrshowbiz.com/starbios http://www.mrshowbiz.com/cgi/architext/AT -sbglobalsearch.cgi --- Caprice Woosley is currently pursuing her BFA in theater (directing and playwriting), after 25 years working in and around community theater. She is a playwright, produced but not published, actress, and amateur dramaturg who enjoys researching plays. She is a host in the Writing Forum where she co-hosts a Writing Discussion Group. She also hosted "Shakespeare Unplugged" in the Theatre Forum. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Rubin's Corner by Robert Rubin A Definition of Broadway I sometimes forget in my enthusiasm for the Broadway theater that their is a another theater world in New York called Off-Broadway. Actors Equity and the League of New York Theaters define an Off-Broadway Theater as a theater that can be located on Broadway. The Off-Broadway theaters located on 76th and Broadway are a perfect example of an Off-Broadway theaters. This seems to be very logical, but your in New York. However, to qualify for Off-Broadway a theater must have 299 seats or less. They usually don't have some of the nice things that Broadway Theaters contain such as infra-red sound systems, an orchestra pit, or an audience waiting areas. An Off-Broadway requires less technical people. Many times you will find yourself sitting on top of the stage in a garage that has been converted into a theater. However, some of our best theater and sometimes some our worst can be found Off-Broadway. The price of tickets can run from $15 to $40, a great saving over their Broadway brother and sisters productions. The current crop of Off-Broadway includes a number of hits. "Born to Sing" brings the glorious voices in this pop/gospel sequel to the long-running, "Mama I Want to Sing". "Cowgirls", the story of a three women classical musical group that is booked into a country and western bar, continues to draw audiences. "I Love Your, You're Perfect, Now Change" is a crowd-pleasing revue about the joys and pitfalls of love and marriage. Everyone in the audience seems to love the outrageous and cleverly costumed revue called "Howard Crabtree's When Pigs Fly". Finally, way up on 76th Street we find, "Old Wicked Songs", which is a look at a passionless pianist and an elderly Viennese musician. The new Off-Broadway season has already produced some interesting plays. "Cakewalk" staring Linda Lavin as Lillian Hellman in a love story will open in just a few days. Last season's, "Full Gallop", brings Mary Louise Wilson back to the stage as Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor of Vogue magazine. If you like "Nunsense", you might like being part of Sister's adult evening class in a new play called, "Late Night Catechism". A new Off-Broadway musical by Mike Craver and Mark Hardwick, about a living-room station in 1920 Arkansas is called "Radio Gals". There is only four weeks left to catch Mart Crowley's 1986 play, "The Boys in the Band". This play about a group of a gay men at a birthday party has gotten rave reviews. As we move toward Christmas, their are a dozen new Off-Broadway shows opening at theaters all over New York. A "View of the Dome", a women's roller coaster ride thru DC politics, scandals, heartbreak and media opens in October. David Mamet brings his play, "Edmond", to the Atlantic Theater Company. This is the controversial story of one man's search for the meaning in the 20th century. We will know in November if Mamet can answer this simple question. The Jewish Rep, the people who give us "Coconuts" bring us a new comedy about a woman trying to stage the ultimate party extravaganza. "431 Of My Closest Friends" opens in late October. They will also produce, "So Long 174 Street", a revival of the hit Broadway musical based on the hilarious book by Carl Reiner. Their third production, in two months, will be about a group of skeptical middle American students try to deal with the Anne Frank story. "Anne Frank and Me", opens in late November. The success of "Rent" has resulted in the Pearl Theater Company producing, "The Barber of Seville". They bill this as a comic romp led by Figaro, the rascally servant of Mozart and Rossinio fame. It opens in early December. Sam Shepard and John Osborne don't want to be left out of the Off-Broadway theater race. Osborne has cast Brian Murray to star in his, "The Entertainer", at the CSC Rep. Sam Shepard, who also seems to be working Off-Broadway on a regular basis, introduces us to the "Tooth of Crime", the story of a rock star and the price he pays for fame. It may not be the usual menu of big plays and musicals, but if your in New York City and want to see some interesting theater then try an Off-Broadway show this Fall. It may not always be the best play you can see, but it will often provide you with an interesting evening of theater. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ W H A T ' S N E W in the Theatre & Performance Forum New Mini-Series First - Every Sunday in October - It's Murdery & Mayhem - Plays about Murder Then in November - a guest from the ultimate Community Theatre - Disney's STAGE Company Transcripts from Shakespeare Unplugged, SCRIPTease, and other special guest and mini-series chats can always be downloaded from the library... New Broadway Season Remember, the new season began September 5th - keep up with the news between issues in the Broadway BBS and Reviews section of the library Back Issues Remember, you can always download back issues of TRE from the Forum Library. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ TRE Trivia: * True or False: There is a musical of Death of a Salesman called O Willy! * In what profession is Laughter on the 23rd Floor set? * What are the 4 ingredients to break the curse in Into the Woods? * Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk star Savion Glover made his broadway debut in what show? * In what year did Les Miserables win the Tony for Best Musical and what shows did it beat out? * While Phantom of the Opera won the 1988 Tony Award for best musical, it did not win the for Best Book or Score. What show did? Answers to last month's trivia: False: Simon Brett's fictional actor-detective Charles Paris starred in an equally fictional musical called Lumpkin! in the mystery novel Startrap. Alec Baldwin created the role of Peter in Prelude to a Kiss on Broadway Speed the Plow is set at a movie-studio, where Bobby and Charlie's plans to make a "buddy picture" collide with a bet about seducing a temp secretary. Mo Gaffney and Kathy Najimy are the full names of the Kathy & Mo Show playwright-performers Yes, There really is a play called The Murder Game, written by Tim In La Cage aux Folles the resident dancers are the Cagelles and the star is Zaza Gossip Tidbits du jour... * The World Premiere of Tommy Tune's new musical about the Barrymores The Royal Family has been postponed at Seattle Rep, which will postpone its possible move to Broadway past the deadline of eligibility for next year's Tony Awards. * Chicago's "Big Four" The Goodman, Steppenwolf, Victory Gardens and Lincolnshire Theatres have withdrawn from the nominating process for next year's Jeff Awards in protest of the committee not allowing multiple winners in a category. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright 1996, Mersinger Theatrical Services