The marketing campaign for Shucked, a new and, rare these days, wholly original Broadway musical (as in, not based on existing IP), has emphasized two points: 0ne, that it is, to quote the green and maize posters somehow ubiquitous around New York, “a new musical comedy”. And two, that it is about corn. The playbill and posters feature a single radiant ear with twinkling kernels; promo photos have the cast grasping full-grown stalks in a faux field. You’d know little else on ads alone – the cheeky campaign has kept details deliberately vague, opting instead for fake quotes (“‘I saw it 300 times before it even opened!’ – George Santos”). Is it actually about corn? Is it country? Is it funny?
The strategy is working – Shucked has some of the strongest intrigue and word-of-mouth buzz on Broadway – and the answers are: yes, not really and kind of, depending heavily on your taste for, surprise surprise, corniness (and dad jokes). The show, with a book by Robert Horn (the Tony-winning writer of Tootsie) with music & lyrics by Nashville veterans Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, is a campy, swift-joking nod to past Broadway favorites – The Book of Mormon, Oklahoma and particularly The Music Man – with a playfully hokey twist. (Horn originally based the production that eventually became Shucked on the variety show Hee Haw, which ran from 1969 to 1991 and mixed eye-rolling skits with country music.) The first number, introduced by two narrators in on the bit (Ashley D Kelley and Grey Henson, so relaxed in their pairing as to appear improvisational), has the cast maneuver gleaming plastic corn ears as they extoll the virtues of the crop as well as some facts (“it’s the same goin’ in, comin’ out”), as if trolling. Yes, this musical is actually about corn.
Or more accurately, corn as the basis for a parable (a “farm to fable”, says one of the narrators in typical Shucked wordplay) of a small, isolated rural town in the midwest. The characters are, as befitting the show’s motif and some country music, overdrawn archetypes, starting with Cob county (everything is genially on the nose), which is surrounded by a wall of corn and doesn’t let people in or out. Maizy (Caroline Innerbichler, in her Broadway debut) is the stubborn, wide-eyed ingenue, determined to see the world after the corn mysteriously (and, on stage, literally) wilts. She makes it as far as Tampa, where she encounters hapless, mint-suited fake podiatrist / very Florida con man Gordy (John Behlmann). He whisks her back to Cob county to fix the corn / his debts, much to the chagrin and suspicion of her erst-while fiance Beau (Andrew Durand), his folksy wise-cracking brother Peanut (Kevin Cahoon, keeping an impressively straight face throughout) and her straight-talking cousin Lulu (Alex Newell).
Hijinks ensue, inflected by the fourth-wall-breaking narrators, who inject much-needed self-awareness into the whole affair (on the racial diversity of this fabled small town, for one). Two of their most complicated bits – a tightly choreographed double phone call with fish-out-of-water Gordy, and a recounting of a corn whiskey-soaked night that speeds up the plot – hit harder for me than any of the many, many jokes on penetration. The overall tone for this two-hour show, directed by Jack O’Brien, careens from sweet to saucy, clever to puerile. It is consciously, with chummy self-awareness, trying to entertain – an exaggerated, though good-natured, send-up of tropes about the rural midwest (the costume design by Tilly Grimes emphasizes denim patches, scenic design by Scott Pask effectively cocoons the whole production within the world’s least rain-proof barn) that winks so hard it might pull a muscle.
Other than occasional banjo plucks, twangy pronunciations, and melodies that recall modern country pop (McAnally and Clark wrote Sam Hunt’s Body Like a Back Road, among other country radio hits), the music in Shucked is decidedly show tune, and solid. The light, melancholic number in Maybe Love was the best for showing off Innerbichler’s delicate voice, which occasionally got overwhelmed by the larger numbers, while Lulu’s barn-storming anthem Independently Owned stopped the show; Newell, a veteran of late-stage Glee, is vocally so far beyond the rest of the cast that they drew a standing ovation.
But Shucked’s power, should it work on you, is in its impressively consistent stream of puns, slow-burn wordplays and PG-13 jokes. The cast’s comedic timing is near universally excellent, though I detected a shadow of a shrug, a hope that you’ll laugh and not groan at the base-aiming humor. Which is not my style, though I seemed to be in the minority. The audience at the matinee I attended laughed throughout, sometimes uproariously and with surprise. I’m not the buyer of this particular variety, but corn sells – which, in the name of an original musical, is something to root for.
