Ashley D. Kelley and Grey Henson serve as our narrators and guides in Shucked (photo by Mathew Murphy & Evan Zimmerman)
SHUCKED
Nederlander Theatre
208 West Forty-First St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 14, $69-$247
shuckedmusical.com
When I was a kid, I watched a syndicated television show called Hee Haw, which originally ran on CBS from 1969 to 1971 and was hosted by celebrated American musicians Roy Clark and Buck Owens, both of whom are in the Country Music Hall of Fame. The variety series took place in the fictional community of Kornfield Kounty, combining great music with satirical sketches and purposely silly jokes poking fun at themselves and rural living. In the opening credits, a cartoon donkey emerged from a row of corn and barked out the title several times.
The new musical Shucked honors its forebear in the second act when, during the song “The Best Man Wins,” a group of guys repeatedly declares, “Yee haw hee haw.” Like Hee Haw, Shucked never passes up a chance at a corny joke; it seems to be why it exists in the first place. And there’s definitely still an appetite for corn: Shucked has quickly become a cult favorite at the Nederlander Theatre, where some attendees have taken to showing up in costume, attending performance after performance.
Featuring a book by Tony winner Robert Horn (Tootsie, 13) and music and lyrics by eight-time Grammy nominee Brandy Clark (no relation to Roy) and three-time Grammy winner Shane McAnally, Shucked takes place in Cob County, an insulated hamlet surrounded by a wall of corn, where puns grow nearly as fast as the international dietary staple that the USDA says is both a vegetable and a grain.
The self-described “farm to fable” is narrated by two nameless storytellers, played by Ashley D. Kelley and Grey Henson, who watch (or participate in) the proceedings with a wink and a nod.
“Now, I know when some of you think ‘small town,’ you think gun totin’, rusted truck hayseeds who think ‘liberal’ is how you pour your whiskey and ‘fluid’ belongs in your gas tank. But I want you to open your minds and think — even smaller,” Kelley says near the beginning.
Cob County is preparing for the wedding of Maizy (Caroline Innerbichler), a play on “maize,” what Native Americans call corn, and prominent farmer Beau (Andrew Durand). It’s not just a celebration of true love but of corn, which brought the two of them together.
The cast of Shucked has never a met a pun it would turn its back on (photo by Mathew Murphy & Evan Zimmerman)
As the storytellers proclaim, “Sweet corn, street corn / It’s really hard to beat corn / Hands or feet no wrong way to eat corn / It’s a resource that’s always renewable / Bring it to a briss / Or a wedding / Or a funeral / Cook it on the cob / Or in a tortilla / You can even make it an onomatopoeia / Candy corn, kettle corn, put it in your mouth / It’s the same goin’ in comin’ out.” Yes, when it comes to corn pone, they leave no quip or double entendre to dry out in a drought.
The wedding is stopped when rows of corn suddenly start dying on the spot. The town’s future is now in jeopardy, from Beau’s farm to Maizy’s cousin Lulu’s (Alex Newell) whiskey.
Despite knowing that no one has ever left Cob County — and returned — Maizy asks Peanut (Kevin Cahoon), Beau’s not-too-bright brother, “Don’t you think someone should leave to get help?” Peanut, who has never been asked a question he couldn’t answer with ridiculous non-sequiturs (or, later, suggestive references involving sexual organs and bodily functions), responds, “I think . . . if your lawyer has a ponytail on his chin, you’re probably goin’ to prison. I think if you can pick up your dog with one hand, you own a cat. I think people in China must wonder what to call their good plates. And I think we need answers. I just don’t think leaving is one of them.”
Even worse than leaving the county is allowing a stranger in, but Maizy heads to the big, scary city — Tampa, Florida — seeking help, which she finds in Gordy (John Behlmann), a desperate con artist in debt to gangsters and who’s been posing as a strip mall podiatrist who treats such foot ailments as bunions and . . . corns. Maizy doesn’t quite get it so convinces Gordy to come back with her to save the town crop.
Sniffing an opportunity to make a fortune by stealing Cob County’s heretofore undiscovered mineral wealth, Gordy goes with Maizy, even pretending to fall in love with her to gain better access to the rocks and abscond, leaving the hapless hamlet to its fate.
Shucked is like a scrumptious piece of salty, hot buttered corn at a summer barbecue, but there’s only so much you can eat at one sitting: Bits get stuck in your teeth, and the rest can be tough to digest. The show is a nonstop barrage of puns that can be hysterical but also overwhelming. And as playfully absurd as the plot is, it sometimes goes haywire, pushing the bounds of credulity, but always with a smile.
Scott Pask’s multilevel wooden set is a ramshackle barn, with raggedy furniture and scene-setting props like small cornrows and neon signs that wheel on and off. Japhy Weideman’s lighting glows magnificently through the gaps in the wood, offering blue and purplish skies and red and yellow sunlight. Tilly Grimes’s costumes would make Roy Clark and Buck Owens proud, with plenty of overalls, baseball caps, boots, dungarees, and patches.
Three-time Tony winner Jack O’Brien’s (The Invention of Love, The Full Monty) direction goes from a sweet simmer to a full-tilt boil, allowing just the right amount of space for Sarah O’Gleby’s merry choreography. Jason Howland’s music supervision, music direction, orchestrations, and arrangements won’t frighten off audience members who think they won’t appreciate country music.
In her Broadway debut, Innerbichler (Frozen, Little House on the Prairie) is charming as the naive and innocent Maizy, while Durand (Ink, Head Over Heels) goes through a tumultuous series of emotions as the determined but heartbroken Beau. Kelley (Eve’s Song, Bella: An American Tall Tale) and Tony nominee Henson (Mean Girls, The Book of Mormon) are a hoot leading us through this hilarious hootenanny, particularly the latter, who offers such prime kernels of truth as “Like the guy with the lifejacket said: ‘It’s foreboding’” and “Like the personal trainer said to the lazy client: ‘This is not working out.’”
Behlmann (The 39 Steps, Significant Other) is deliciously evil as the mustache-twirling villain, but Newell (Glee, Once on This Island) steals the show as the philosophical Lulu, who shakes the rickety rafters belting out the feminist anthem “Independently Owned,” in which she declares, “I’m independently owned and liberated / And I think sleeping alone is underrated / Don’t need a man for flatteries / I got a corn cob and some batteries.”
She also shares this gem: “Men lie all the time. Hell, one tried to convince me you could suck out a kidney stone.”
You never would have heard that joke on Hee Haw.