SOMETIMES THE LITTLE RASCALS would try to put on a show. Spanky would cry, "Let's put on a show!" Darla would heave amorously at the dynamism of the idea, and Alfalfa would get the lead as chief crooner. (Buckwheat, of course had to build scenery and sell tickets.) Eventually the rich kids down the street, unmitigatedly evil and oversized in their velvet Fauntleroy suits would come around to tear down the stage and abduct Darla. Like little well-dressed Huns they would attack until sandbagged by the faithful stagehand Buckwheat or popped in the eye by Captain Spanky. In these Depression allegories, the bullies always ended up running, torn and muddied, back to their monocled mamas while the Rascals had a champagne victory party of Moxie and jellycakes.

Wait a minute, though! What happens when the other side decides to put on a show itself? What happens when they countersubversively decide to use the Rascals' best weapon--amateur audacity and charm--to win mass approval for themselves? Crafty kids. They ask dad the best way to raise the money, and they ask mum if they can borrow the interior decorator to do the sets and they hire a Professional Director to choreograph the kick line. But No Girls Allowed, so some of the kids stuff their skirts with petticoats and put on phony busts. Step kick kick, step kick kick, and pretty soon it's opening night. What then?

It's a gala night. (And, as Groucho Marx used to say, a gala night's enough for any man.) Great spots cross the sky and anxious kiddie producers in tuxedos pace back and forth and bark orders at underlings who run concentric. The audience, mostly in black ties, looks swell--the oldest-looking bunch of kids in captivity. The tickets have gone for plenty and bottles of Dom Perignon are firing corks here and there around the old molded theater. The orchestra strikes up the overture. A member of the audience shoots up out of his chair, raining champagne from his glass, delighted by the first bar of music. "It's excellent!" he tells the seated. "An excellent score! Excellent! where's Frank? Getting sick already? Excellent!"

A short eon later, at the intermission, he seems to be of the same opinion. "Excellent show!" he calls, slapping the back of the stranger in front of him. To the stranger though, the show looks like Spanky's Revenge: a dog with a pedigree, but nevertheless a dog.

THE FIRST ACT has several big strikes against it. The main one is the book, which is basically a stinker. It's not the plot, which, as is usual with a Hasty Pudding Show, is as easy to track as a follow-the-fettucini puzzle, not is it the cast of characters whose names are, as usual in a Pudding Show, very funny: Juana deBoise, Ophelia Heartbeat, Manual Dexterite, Sonya Vabitzsche, Della Tory. It's just that the thousands of little jokes--the troops of mice that are expected to drag the Pudding's great gilded carriage--are less tonight's Dom Perignon than tomorrow's Taylor State. And borrowing! The authors must have been sharing their beds with old Gilligan's Island writers who talk in their sleep.

More difficult to deal with is the problem of bad taste. Humor that tries to squeeze laughs out of other peoples' misery in the snugness of a Harvard theater, among the comfortable familiarity of jokes about stocks and bonds and investment bankers is somehow worse than callous; along those lines, this show must be the worst since the last time Bob Hope played the Nixon White House. Sexism and class insularity shoves the show forward. "When father was alive we were so poor we used to get foreign aid from Bangladesh!" cracks an actor. 'Excellent joke!" screams the happiest spectator. "Excellent!"

Fighting gallantly against a book that deep-sixes its protagonists by the halfway point is a sweatingly exuberant cast. Doing his annual turn as a blonde-coiffed mountain is the estimable Bob Peabody, whose delicate elephant walk and open-mouthed grin (in which a Sopwith Camel could do circus loops without destroying the bridgework) remind one of a cross between Everest and Margaret Dumont. He is a natural wonder and a natural comedian. Mark Szpak's slithering, thrilling Juana deBoise puts him in a class with Lupe Velez and Luis Tiant--all unintelligible delights. David Levi as Sonya Vabitsche looks like a very funny lab sample of Venereal Disease germs and David Merrill as Ophelia Heartbeat is a knockout. The rest of the cast works well, too. But an extension of this paragraph must go to Japes Emerson, who plays Cardinal Cynne. Leering with the shifty paranoia of a male Jane Curtin, Emerson moves, under his clerical robes and Rasputin beard, with a pneumatic grace and, except for a deficient malevolent laugh, his voice is the silky articulator of a deft cartoon of nastiness. When, after Emerson and Levi's "Living in Sin" number Mr. First Nighter lets loose his battle cry ("Ex-cellent!), there is no dissent here or anywhere.

And indeed the second act of Cardinal Knowledge gets better. For one thing, it's shorter than the first act. For another the numbers are much catchier. The music by Paris K.C. Barklay is peppy, sweet and unashamedly derivative. One nice number called "Heaven Would Be Hell Without You" has phrases astonishingly like Jerome Kern's "Can't Help Loving That Man of Mine," and Leonard Bernstein could claim at least a one per cent royalty. But the best music is Barklay's own and sprightly. The lyrics rise and dip, more to Appalachian than Olympic heights and similarly on the downward scale. The choreography is mostly precise and beautifully executed, especially a magnificent number called, "Raising Your Spirits," in which a line of ersatz dames in devil suits (a genre for which I myself have always had a soft spot) tap in regiment behind clouds of stage smoke. Now that, as the saw and moguls on the west coast would say, is entertainment.

The set's terrif; likewise lighting and anything else technical. But how much can you root for this show? It's just not enough fun or makeshift enough to put you on the side of the creators. On a professional scale--you can forget about bombing in New Haven--this show would be lucky to limp out of Bridgeport without a lynching. It's a conceit, and that's all right, but whose conceit is it? The question of what constituency the Pudding and its scripts represent seems to have come late in Cardinal Knowledge when an innocent cast member dared to drop a line that even Mary Louise Smith wouldn't have minded: "Don't lie to me! If I want lies I'll talk to a Republican." Great throaty, angry boos came up from the audience (which would have, 40 years ago, marched down to the Trans-Lux to boo Roosevelt in the newsreels.)

Once in a while, a fellow forgets where he is. "Americans," wrote Thornton Wilder, "are abstract." For the most part, he believed, we identify ourselves more by our future than by our circumstance. "I am I," Wilder said, "because my plans characterize me." Strangely enough, it seems to be to this principle that the Hasty Pudding entertainment devotes itself: to the confidence that the money will always be there, to a tradition rigidly in place for years after its power to amuse has ended, not so much to the idea of men in women's clothing, but to just which men have gotten into women's clothing. So much confidence in the sameness of the future do the Pudding participants have that, more interested in the project than the theater, they can put on this elaborate celebration of the way things are, were and will be. There is no groping, little creating and no confusion--simply the acting out of a rite of tradition that never wants change or growth. Maybe this is all right in matters of religion or faith, but in a convention of frivolity there seems to be something the matter with it. Unless it is a matter of something that runs deeper, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with life or theater or the times we live in, even for many people at Harvard.

THOSE TO WHOM it does mean something should go see it, because despite a dead book you'll like what you already expect to find. For the rest, it is only a good place to go and spot the shapes and forms of materializing plans, coming things and future values coalesce on a local stage to bouncy music under colored lights. As the lyrics to the title song say:

If you produce a Pudding show,

And doctor the accounts;

You've got the Cardinal Knowledge,

AND YOUR CHECKS WILL NEVER BOUNCE!

Yes, you've got the Cardinal Knowledge,

It's the only one that counts!

And yet if you go back and look at pictures of Cole Porter and the gleeful Yalies dressed in men's and women's clothing for their 1901 revelries, they don't seem so bad. Their charm, cleverness and sense of fun made their elitism tolerable, even nice. No like qualities abound here. All that's left is a brittle, petrified reminder of things past and a joyless, smiling augur of things to come.