Review: In ‘Shucked’, a Glut of Gleeful Puns and 'Cornography’
A countrified musical about corn, and filled with it, too, transplants itself to Broadway, with songs by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally.
The cast of the new musical comedy "Shucked," with songs by the Nashville songwriting team of Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, at the Nederlander Theater in Manhattan. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times.
Puns, the pundit John Oliver has said, are not merely the lowest form of humor but "the lowest form of human behavior. The academy agrees. In the 1600s, no less a literary luminary than John Dryden denounced lowbrow verbal amusements that "torture one poor word ten thousand ways."
You may know how that one poor word feels after seeing "Shucked," the anomalous Broadway musical about corn that opened on Tuesday at the Nederlander Theater. For more than two hours, it pelts you with piffle so egregious — not just puns but also dad jokes, double entendres and booby-trapped one-liners — that, forced into submission, you eventually give in.
Many of the puns, which I will not try to top, are of course about corn, from the title on down. The story is after all set in the fictional Cob County, where the locals, long isolated from the rest of the world by a wall of "cornrows," live in the perfect "hominy" of entrenched dopiness. Or at least they do until the corn, like some of those puns, starts dying.
That's when our plucky heroine — obviously called Maizy (Caroline Innerbichler) — dares to seek help in the great beyond. Jeopardizing her imminent wedding to the studly but xenophobic Beau (Andrew Durand) and ignoring the advice of her cousin, Lulu (Alex Newell), she heads to Tampa. In that decadent metropolis, she seeks agricultural assistance from Gordy, a con man posing as a podiatrist she misconstrues as a "corn doctor." Being grifty,
Gordy (John Behlmann) returns to Cob County with Maizy not so much to cure the crop as to reap the wealth he thinks lies beneath it: a vast outcropping of precious gemstone.
Like Gordy, the audience may have difficulty extracting the gems from the corn. For one thing, there is so much corn to process. It's not just the relentless puns. The musical's book, by Robert Horn, embracing what one of the genial songs (by the country music team of Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally) calls "cornography," trades on all kinds of trite wisdom and low humor.
