Review: Shucked by touring company
by Brian Paul Scipione

Oh Henry, you were indubitably a champ, but the ears are buzzing all along the rows that the best punster of them all was James Joyce, so, we should of course rejoice and applaud in O Henry’s efforts to not only stalk his predecessor but o’er take him across the bow and shuck him aside like a tasseled and braced silk suit leaving a mere husk where before the tillers once held strong.

 

While there may be a kernel of wisdom in that opening sentence that stretches on longer than a well-sown field, the true challenge is to compose a review about a production that is built upon puns while it plays upon the paronomasia that may amaze one in a maize maze without the assays or surveys that originally lead to this very haze of verbal malaise.

 

Shucked debuted on Broadway at the Nederlander Theatre on April 4th, 2023, and its final performance was less than a year later on January 14, 2024. This was not due to bad reviews. It was warmly received by audiences and critics alike and garnered nine Tony nominations, including one for Best Musical. It did take home one win, Best Featured Actor in a Musical, collected by non-binary performer Alex Newell (one of the first of two such ever to be nominated). It’s a simple story of simple people that takes place in Cob County: boy loves girl but when the corn dies, she leaves for the big city to help the town, only to fall in love with a con man who deceives her and the town while he’s falling in love with girl number two who makes whisky and steals engine parts. This new-found romance does not keep him from proposing to girl number one which causes boy number one to get the con man drunk: all that while their good friend Peanut delivers some of the most hilariously droll observations in a masterwork of non-sequiturs.

 

You see? Simple.

 

The truth: as far as Broadway musicals go, this is one of the most original and jubilant to debut in years. An original, in that it's not a remake of a well-known IP, a sequel, a parody, or even a satire. It so strongly eschews any sense of a political stance that there isn’t even a swipe at high fructose corn syrup until the final scenes of the play. (Some viewers and readers may remember the series of commercials that debuted in June 2008 with the tag line “It’s Only Corn!”  It was created by the Corn Refiners Association to counter all the intense negative publicity that the corn industry was receiving since the country at large had become aware of the deleterious health consequences of consuming too much high fructose corn syrup. Or perhaps no one remembers, in which case the commercials were quite effective).

 

Shucked has no interest even in drawing stringent lines between different economic classes or religious beliefs. That would be so easy to do in any story about God-fearing small-town folks going to the big city. The script concentrates only on fitting as many possible puns on corn and rural life as it can into a well-paced story of romantic good intentions gone awry. This makes it a welcome addition to the pantheon of musical theater. One might even call it a less refined Oklahoma!

 

 

The national tour has been on the road  only since October 20, 2024, and audiences are ready for it. While it hasn't been surprising to see audience members painted blue for the Blue Man Group or wearing princess gowns to Frozen, it was a treat to see many at Bass Concert Hall embracing their inner farm hands. While not dressed in exactly the same garb as the characters, folks were clearly very familiar with Shuck's most popular musical numbers. Overall, people were clearly on board with the happy-go-lucky nature of this production (except, of course, The New York Times reviewer who went so far as to suggest it was antisemitic).

 

Reba McEntire officially endorsed the prodution, which made some folks, including myself, assume she was involved somehow. In a video promo she invokes such lofty names as Cats, Sweeney Todd, Fiddler on the Roof, and Hamilton though it's hard to tell why,beyond the fact that all of the above are musicals. It's true that an avocado is technically a fruit, and a tomato is both a fruit and a vegetable, and corn is botanically a fruit, a vegetable, and a grain but Shucked is no Jack Kennedy or—more to point—no Alexander Hamilton. There has been a lot of speculation on why this production, closed a mere nine months after its Broadway debut, already has a film adaptation in the works being helmed by the same team that created the musical.

 

This story that room for many favorite characters though not necessarily for favorite performers. That's probably because this story was originally conceived as Moonshine: That Hee Haw Musical. Hee Haw, for those fortunate enough to not know it, was a seventies variety show famous for its low comedy, stereotypes, and borderline racist, classist, and sexist humor: kind of like the The Benny Hill Show lite. The comedy gold in Shucked is not deeply buried; it's rather gaudily worn on the farmer-snot-coated sleeves of the characters. As in much of contemporary Broadway work, it offers a multitude of opportunities for the performers to flex their singing and dancing muscles, but the producers have opted for the easy and, more to the point, economical route. The costumes are so uniform and uninspiredthey could have just asked the actors to source them themselves. The singing is by the book, the green screen is heavilyrelied upon, and the dancing is restrained to the point that no one seems to be breaking a sweat. No real bangers or overtly catchy tunes on the soundtrack; as if to disguise this lack, each number is mired before and afterin an absolute unwieldly amount of comedic dialogue. As we’ve already mentioned, it's is entirely made up of dad jokes, groaners, knee slappers, cartoonish low-brow accents, pun upon punishing pun, and (we can't resist) corny humor.

 

Finally, as mentioned before, Shucked strains so hard to remain apolitical that it manages to be both homophobic and homoerotic at the same time. It’s hard to tell whether it's celebrating conservative values or lambasting them. One gag boasts that in Cobb County Roe vs. Wade is nothing more than a debate about how to best cross a river. Then a bit later another character asserts we can’t let fear destroy everything we know. Not only does the music remain in a single genre; its particular version of Pop 40 country music is consistently played in half time, rendering it plodding and sometimes painfully slow. When the piece reaches for hoe-down vibes, it does so only in short increments.

 

Summing it up: this production is pitch-perfect ready made for community theatre adaptation, especially since almost all the musical heavy lifting is done by a single character. Maizey is featured on six songs. The other leads? LuLu has two numbers while Beau and Gordy only have one each. The creators claim that Hee Haw was this work’s greatest influence, but it is more likely they had Schmigadoon! in mind. Like that Apple TV+ musical parody, Shucked is incredibly clever, belly-achingly funny, and targeted towards a niche audience.

 

I believe we're still quite a way from ChatGPT writing musicals that people will actually produce. Nevertheless, Shucked is so extremely middle of the road that what we have here may very well be an unintentional preview of that very thing.

 

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Shucked
touring company

November 12 - 17, 2024

Broadway in Austin at Bass Concert Hall