Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
Shucked, now running at D.C.’s National Theatre, the latest stop of the North American Tour, is the story of simple folk in a small town who panic when their entire livelihood, the town’s supply of corn (it grows in ‘cornrows’) begins to shrivel up. It butters its bread with old wives’ tales and dad jokes. (I suppose I could say butters its corn, but I’m not falling for this trap.) It’s riddled with one-liners about marriage and drunk driving and grandma’s teeth and old pickup trucks and grandma’s ashes and orgasms and pooping squirrels. A lot of them feel like rejected Jeff Foxworthy or Larry the Cable Guy jokes.
When the quip, ‘As the personal trainer said to their lazy client, this isn’t working out,’ mustered up only a handful of laughs, I groaned because, well, I agreed. How was this show, one so clearly designed as a laugh-a-minute, howdy-doody cornucopia (oops!), just failing to work on me at all?
Then it won me over.
Or maybe it wore me down?
You see, Shucked is relentless. The first three jokes are all puns. The opening number, fittingly titled ‘Corn’, includes a corncob chorus kickline, a lyric ripped from the Corn Kid who went viral on TikTok a few years ago (remember Corn Kid? Shucked does!), and a joke about how corn is always ‘the same going in (as) coming out.’ Where is there to go from there? There are two more hours to fill and they seem to have used up all of their best material.
There must be a story around all those jokes, so young Maizy (Danielle Wade), ‘named, obviously, after her grandmother,’ becomes the first person to venture outside of Cob County, hoping to find an answer to their irrigation issue. She has to leave her beau, Beau (Jake Odmark), and cousin, Lulu (Miki Abraham) back home while she heads to the big city of Tampa. There she meets Gordy (Quinn VanAntwerp), a con man with a need for some dough and a place to hide out. Pretending to be an expert on the art of growing vegetables, he travels back home with her and swindles the town Music Man-style, offering answers to their corn questions.
The cast, luckily, is filled with some of the finest singers I’ve heard from a touring cast in quite some time, though their voices may be better suited for Rock of Ages than Dollywood, much less the Grand Ole Opry. Wade really plays up that southern drawl, like Reba or Dolly. In fact, she sounds just like all of the TikTokers you’ve seen auditioning for the open call of Dolly’s new musical. Actually, I’m surprised I haven’t seen her put her name in the running with her own TikTok entry. Odmark, though occasionally asked to find the upper tier of his range, is sweet and charming when he settles in. Abraham, just like her Broadway counterpart Alex Newell, does her best to tuck the whole thing under her arm and walk away with it when she sings ‘Independently Owned’, an I-don’t-need-no-man anthem that feels like a discard from the latest Miranda Lambert album.
And that, to me, is the most glaring issue with Shucked: on the whole, the songs just aren’t very good. I was surprised to see that the songwriting team of Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally have country music backgrounds, as most of it feels like what a Broadway composer thinks country music sounds like. Perhaps it’s Jason Howland’s orchestrations (or perhaps it’s the size of a touring orchestra), devoid of fiddles or finger-picking with only the occasional banjo twang emulating the sound of authentic country music. Their experience writing great tunes for Kacey Musgraves and Willie Nelson doesn’t seem to translate to the stage, often with rhyme schemes that even Tim Rice would want another pass on.
Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
That is until the back-to-back hits ‘Friends’ and ‘Best Man Wins’ toward the end of the show’s second act. ‘Friends’ is a make-up or break-up song for the bickering Maizy and Lulu and easily the most musically complex number, and not-so-coincidentally the most powerful and emotional moment of the entire show. Wade and Abraham sing it beautifully. That’s followed by a number for the boys, ‘Best Man Wins’, a fast-paced barrel of laughs that also includes fantastically fun barrel dancing choreography by Sarah O’Gleby.
It was this one-two punch that made me realize I was being too hard on Shucked.
Director Jack O’Brien, known for his strengths in stage comedy, has aimed for nothing but fun and that’s largely what he’s achieved, even if Clark and McAnally would rhyme ‘fun’ with sun and gun and won and ton, and if book writer Robert Horn’s jokes are largely riffs on those tacky Southern kitchen tchotchkes that say things like, ‘Dinner’s ready if the microwave’s working.’ Lines like ‘If you can pick up your dog with one hand, you’ve got a cat’ probably make more sense for redneck joke-of-the-day calendars than they do for Broadway or the National, though they may clean up when the play hits the dinner theatre circuit. If the show is a modern-day Hee Haw, folks didn’t lean on that for anything high-brow or transgressive either, though I was surprised by how explicit and naughty Shucked is – I think several parents expecting a family-friendly square-dancin’ ole time will have some explaining to do in the car ride home.
And maybe it deserves more credit than I was giving it. At first, I found the narrator characters called Storyteller 1 (Maya Lagerstam) and Storyteller 2 (usually TheatreTok breakout star Tyler Joseph Ellis, but we saw the character debut of swing Nick Raynor at the first D.C. performance) to be lazy approximations of plot devices, explaining what should be seen and not heard … until their true purpose was revealed and I awwwed along with everyone else.
Aw shucks.
I’ve tried my best to avoid the low-hanging vegetable of the corn pun (although the show takes any chance it gets), but, unfortunately, I don’t think there is one better word to sum up Shucked, one word that expresses its intention and its weight, one word that tells you everything you need to know about this silly little musical:
Corny.
Shucked runs about 2 hours 15 minutes including intermission. The show is recommended for ages 10. Shucked contains adult themes, moments of adult language and a harvest of corny innuendo.
Shucked runs through March 2 at Washington DC’s National Theatre. Other cities on the schedule include Durham, Buffalo, Baltimore, Boston, Cleveland, Atlanta, Tampa, Orlando, San Diego, Los Angeles, Seattle, Minneapolis, Toronto and more. Visit the official website for more information. Use our Ticketmaster link to purchase tickets.
SHUCKED at The National Theatre
Broadway at the National
Check our Ticketmaster link for ticket availability.
