A lot of people on and around Broadway have been getting “Shucked” recently and I felt the need to do the same – and I’m quite glad I did..
To the uninitiated “Shucked” is a pun- and double-entendre-laden country music comedy about a rural community facing a corn crisis. In other words, it’s corny, but also quite good.
The musical has music and lyrics by country music writers Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, and a book by Robert Horn.
Based loosely on the television variety show “Hee Haw,” which featured country music and humor with Kornfield Kounty, a fictional rural county, as the backdrop, and which aired first-run on CBS from 1969 to 1971 and has continued in reruns off and on ever since, the show was almost called “Moonshine: That He Haw Musical,” which was an earlier and not overly successful project by Horn.
The kick line of corncobs was one of the show’s stars
If you’ve seen and liked the commercials or online videos advertising the show that use vague corn-related puns, you’ll unquestionably enjoy the show, as this reviewer did. It’s a non-stop barrage of the puns – referred to be x as “the lowest form of humor” – as well as trite wisdom, double entendres, dad jokes, and clumsy one-liners – that eventually lull you into acceptance and submission. It’s “cornography” at its finest, to borrow a word from one of McAnally and Clark’s songs.
You will actually start to care about corn.
Corn is a plant that grows long ears of kernels on tall, grass-like stalks and there’s plenty of that here, especially because the people of the fictional Cob County – perhaps a twin city of Kornfield Kounty – run into a corn crisis early in the show.
They don’t run out of corny ways of explaining this, however.
[Editor’s note: For the uninitiated, he term “corn” and “corny” can refer to jokes that are either worn out and tiresome or overly sentimental – and sometimes both.]
Cob County is separated – or isolated – from the rest of the world by cornrows (yes, really!). They all live together in perfect “hominy” until the corn states to die on the stalk, as do some of the jokes.
Enter Maize (get it?), our intrepid heroine, portrayed by Caroline Innerbichler, comes in. Like a member of the Amish community on Rumspringa, she leaves Cob despite an imminent wedding to the rather studly Beau (Andrew Durand) and ignores the advice of her corn liquor-brewing cousin Lulu (Alex Newell) and goes to a big, decadent metropolis… Tampa,
In Tampa, the show starts to give multiple nods to “The Music Man” as Maize (pronounced Mai-ze) meets a flim-flam artist who set up shop as an unlicensed podiatrist, with a sign on his practice that says Corn Doctor.
There’s also a nod in the show to one of my favorite musicals of all time, “The Sound of Music,” reminiscent of when Sister Bertha and another nun remove the distributor wires of the vehicles driven by several of the Nazis who are chasing the von Trapp family but I won’t give this one away.
Meanwhile, in Tampa, that’s all the naïve Maize needed to see, a real-life corn doctor. She brings Gordy the corn doctor (John Behlmann) back to Cob County and hilarity ensues.
Clark and McAnally’s music is good but not very memorable, with the exception of the number “Independently Owned,” a true showstopper in “Shucked” thanks to Alex Newell’s exceptional performance of it.
Throughout the show, Peanut (Kevin Cahoon, the only holdover from the “Hee Haw” musical), seems prone to non-sequitur jokes that only serve to cement his role as the town half-wit (“Like the personal trainer said to the lazy client: This is not working out.”) without adding much to the plot, but he is quite earnest in his mission.
Ultimately, despite the efforts of director Jack O’Brien, we never – to borrow a phrase from my father’s friend Professor Richard Brown of the course “ xxxx” fame – I never got on the ride and became invested in what happens to the show’s characters. I liked them but, when all was said and done, I just wished everyone would decide who was going to marry whom.
Sarah O’Gleby’s choreography is brilliant and particularly notable for her kick line of corncobs that made me think of the talking boxes of “Avenue Q,” and Scott Pask’s set is “Green Acres” appropriate as are Tilly Grimes’ costumes.
“Shucked” missed a golden opportunity à la the recent revival of “Oklahoma” to distribute cornbread during the interval but it’s otherwise a strong hit, not a miss.
THE DETAILS
Shucked
Nederlander Theater
208 West 41 Street
New York, N.Y. 10036
Running time: 2 hours and 15 min.
www.shuckedmusical.com
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
All Rights Reserved Travel