The new musical “Shucked”—with music and lyrics by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally and a book by Robert Horn, directed by Jack O’Brien and choreographed by Sarah O’Gleby, at the Nederlander—is exactly what you think it is, if you’ve seen any of its many ads: a show whose often disparate parts are held together only by tough, silky fibres of sometimes indigestible corn. The story is set in a mythical place called Cob County; its inhabitants are implicitly Midwestern, and, as the name of their locale attests, they all have a relentless tendency toward puns and other kernels of wordplay. They’re cut off from the outside world, happily secluded, shielded by a high, lush wall of their favorite vegetable, which they use to fuel their economy and feed their people. Nobody leaves Cob County, and nobody new comes in.
The drama starts when the corn dies. For no reason that any of Cob’s inhabitants can figure out, the crop goes bust, and the town begins to panic. Maizy (Caroline Innerbichler), a young, slightly oblivious optimist with a yen for adventure, decides to venture forth from her provincial home town—much to the chagrin of her fiancé, Beau (Andrew Durand)—to find some help for the wilting sheaves and the people, her people, who depend on them.
Now, you might read that setup and, like I did, expect some strands of more or less subtle social critique. A play about corn and its scarcity might, for example, unspool as a parable about America’s dependence on ethanol, and how that dependency skews our politics in agricultural states. Or maybe it could say something about how the swiftly warming climate and the attendant disruptions in the weather can make our food—and drinks and fuel and harvest-time decorations—ever more difficult to come by. The absolute enclosure of Cob County might prompt a consideration of traditionalism and xenophobia, and how they curdle into self-destruction in the very places they mean to protect. But, no, there’s none of that. This musical’s considerable successes and occasional wobbles both spring from the fact that its overriding motive seems to be simply to clear its authors’ heads of a lifetime’s worth of jokes about corn, while putting a few singable country-tinged songs across. Lacking some unitary purpose or polished message, it gets by on charm and good humor and little else.
“Shucked” ’s lack of interest in coherence is evident from the beginning, when two storytellers, played by Ashley D. Kelley (Storyteller 1) and Grey Henson (Storyteller 2), start cracking jokes. They assure the audience that this is less a fleshed-out story than a “farm to fable” (hardy har) that they will narrate at their leisure. Instead of a pair of solemn monologuists, Kelley and Henson are, mercifully, more like a Catskills comedy team, rattling off quips in the rhythm of standup comedy. Their priority is to establish a rapport with the crowd, not to shellac their show with a fresh coat of meaning-making paint.
The storytellers are both able singers—Kelley more the soloist and Henson providing clear, sweet harmony. But they’re even better at peering over the lip of the stage and gently undermining the action as it unfolds. Sometimes they pander outright, almost totally independent of the context of the show, to the putatively liberal New York audience. When one character’s plan is foiled, Kelley quips, “he needed to find a plan B. But as we all know, there are a lot of people who would like to put a stop to Plan B.” Their relaying of Cob County’s founding myth is an exercise in skewering Broadway’s Benetton-ad approach to casting and avoidance of historical awkwardness:
Along with a nicely coördinated ensemble of choristers, they toss together joyous strings of corn references:
Maizy’s clarity of heart and fuzziness of mind—traits she shares with Beau, even as her sojourn rends their relationship—underscores the tone of the show at its most entertaining: idiotic in the best possible way. Silliness is its creators’ North Star, often resulting in a juvenile exuberance—especially when it comes to sexual innuendo—that matches “South Park” ’s when “South Park” is good. Somehow, the first metropolis that Maizy finds is Tampa, Florida (another thing that doesn’t matter much here is geography), a place indicated by turquoise and pinkish light reminiscent of “Miami Vice.” She tracks down a scuzzy “Corn Doctor” named Gordy (John Behlmann), who—of course—is a foot specialist, or at least purports to be. Maizy brings him back to Cob County, where just about nobody—including Maizy’s cousin Lulu (Alex Newell) and Beau—trusts him. It’s an enjoyably dopey story full of enjoyably dopey characters.
That early bit about shoehorned-in “disparate” and “diverse” characters proves its own logic down the line. It scarcely matters that Maizy’s grandfather (Dwayne Clark) and cousin Lulu are Black—nobody ever explains the fact, or seems to want to. It’s just convenient for the songwriters, Clark and McAnally, who need Newell around to show off her powerful, agile, peacocking voice. On the night I attended, after Newell sang the empowering (if slightly—I’m sorry—corny) anthem “Independently Owned,” the audience erupted into show-pausing cheers. Durand’s Beau has a similarly bravura song, which, early on, offers this country-music-parodizing line: “When I wasn’t raising corn, I was raising hell.”
The foundation of the show’s sound is country music—there are often banjos twanging away somewhere in the mix. Clark and McAnally are popular country songwriters who have crafted hits for the likes of Keith Urban and Darius Rucker. Their facility with memorable melodies and clever lyrics is clearly discernible here, even if the smooth-listening imperatives of the Broadway sound often override the funkier, rootsier aspects of country.
That smoothing down—from country to country-flavored—provides another way of thinking about the show’s mostly innocuous but sometimes glaring avoidance of its own possible political implications. One of the more striking things about “Shucked” is how easily—give or take a joke about birth control—it could tour the country after its Broadway run, just as digestible in conservative precincts as in Times Square. With its gentle digs at small-town closed-mindedness, it might end up working best in the blue-voting urban precincts of red states.
Even the show’s constant references to sex are double-edged. One of the funniest characters is a guy named Peanut (Kevin Cahoon), whose jokes reminded me of Jeff Foxworthy’s Nascar-belt comedy: “I think if you have time to jump in front of a bullet for someone, they have time to move,” or “If your lawyer has a ponytail on his chin, you’re probably goin’ to prison.” He also makes jokes whose punch lines land somewhere near the anus. It becomes clearer as the show goes on that he’s queer, but in a lusty, loony way that makes his desires seem even more cartoonish than those of his blockheaded peers. It made me wonder what kind of laugh Horn, the book’s talented writer, was after, or whether the point was that he’d rather not choose.
Nobody wants a hard-edged “Shucked,” the kind that John Oliver might make, investigating at length the knotty issue of, say, agricultural subsidy. But, at times, this quite fun night out did seem to want to have something to say. Throw those ideas into the zapper, I say, and let ’em pop. ♦
