The Me Nobody Knows

The idea of a musical based upon the Ghetto Experience is as excitingly original as the kick-off for the latest Humphrey for President campaign, but if Hubert was as imaginative and charming as The Me Nobody Knows it would Standing Room Only on Capitol Hill. The show, which comes to Boston after long runs in New York and across the country, is based on the writings of New York City school children between the ages of 7 through 18. The texts are combined with music and dancing to create a series of episodes with a few recurrent themes. It is unfortunate that the quality of these episodes should sometimes be so uneven and, although it would be nice to say that the performers do their best to skirt the weak spots, they are in fact eager collaborators. Nonetheless, the cast is a delight from beginning to end, able to sustain the serious numbers as well as to excell in the comic ones--and there is more real humor in this show than in a whole slew of plays by Neil Simon.

Rather than a contrived situation comedy that gets its laughs making fun of people losing at life, The Me Nobody Knows is an ingenuous comedy of the vernacular that succeeds because of its preciseness without ever having to sacrifice its dignity. The problem is the inherent pretentiousness of the play's "socially relevant" theme. In the second act cliche overwhelms originality. At arbitrary moments the lights suddenly dim to blue and an individual actor or perhaps the entire company whimpers some plaintive song that sounds like a speech Rod McKuen might have written for John Lindsay. A few times the self-indulgence runs so deep I expected the cast to start asking the audience for spare change.

The emotive excesses could be blamed on the musical's genre. By basing the show so completely on the ramdon writings of New York school children its creators sacrifice any sort of dramatic structure. The Me Nobody Knows has no story, no beginning, no middle, no end and no point other than the fashionable themes the adaptors have mainlined into its bloodstream. Without a dramatic situation to explore, the creators must try to manufacture the significance that ought to have emerged naturally. When they abruptly make it heavy, it's not surprising the product sometimes seems phony.

But The Me Nobody Knows can never escape its own brilliance, just as its ten year old actor Ralph Carter cannot help stealing the show. The program says that in school Ralph "played the Prince in Cinderella and Peter Cottontail in an Easter play." Well Ralph has parlayed his prior experience into a fortune of acting virtuosity. It is fantastic to see this miniature human being mimic the mannerisms of his elders so exactly. At one point he tells about a racist insult he received at a neighborhood store and then brings down the house when he turns to the audience with mock exasperation and says, "I just can't get no respect." Lenny Bari does a wonderful job as the white juvenile delinquent who loves "what the girls have" but never quite gets it. In the prosaically titled by wonderfully written song "If I Had a Million Dollars" Lenny sings that if he had a million dollars he'd "buy a courtroom." Alan Howard plays Carlos who, lonely away at a boarding school and forgotten by his family writes letters to "Mr. Grady," the only person he thinks still cares about him. As he gets more and more depressed writing Mr. Grady about his loneliness he obsessively repeats, "I had better change the subject" but never really can.

The Me Nobody Knows was one of the first musicals of its kind when it opened in New York off-Broadway. Then its rhetoric, its "message" might have fit in and been original. But it was followed by some inferior shows that droned on the same theme so that now it cannot help but seem somewhat hackneyed. And Hubert Humphrey was a great Mayor of Minneapolis.