Theater: Turkey Trot

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Every fall Broadway recovers its touching faith that "it looks like a good season." Every spring Shubert Alley echoes with moans of lamentations that "the worst season ever" has just passed. In the very first week of the new season, there was already a springlike sense of woe.

The mercy of oblivion promptly descended on Dr. Cook's Garden, Keep It in the Family, and Song of the Grasshopper, three turkeys that trotted to their dooms. Appropriately enough, Garden was about mercy killing of a sort. Dr. Cook has kept God's bucolic little acre of Greenfield Center, Vt., weeded by systematically poisoning mentally retarded children and town skinflints who fight bills for new schools. Burl Ives as the doctor made a sly sweet monster, but he wasn't really scary. What was really scary about the Ira Levin melodrama was that someone produced it.

Keep It in the Family might have been called Bringing Down Father. Father is a tyrannical martinet who stamps on the egos of his wife and children as if they were vermin. The eeriest sight of the evening was watching Patrick Magee's performance as the domineering parent: apparently no one told him that he was no longer playing the mad marquis in last season's Marat Sade.

Song of the Grasshopper was a fable that pitted the steady workers of this world against a charming drone. Naturally the drone wins. Alfred Drake played the role in his customary vagabond troubadour style, sans songs. Grasshopper was adapted from the Spanish, and the original play may just possibly have possessed something more dramatic than tedium recollected in tranquillity.