Corn. Corn. Corn corn corn. Corncorncorncorncorn. Corn. Corn corn corn corn. Corn. Corn. Corn. Corn. Coooooooooooooooooooooooorn. Crn. CORN. CORN! Corn. Corn? ¡Corn!
Corn.
Broadway hit Shucked is a musical about corn, and very funny it is too. In part that’s simply because a story about a group of corn-loving hicks is intrinsically amusing: corn! It’s a funny word in its way, especially when said as often as it’s said in Shucked (which is a lot).
And it’s not just jokes about corn: book writer Robert Horn is an absolute ninja with a one-liner, and Shucked is near enough wall-to-wall with the things. I sort of don’t want to spoil any. But I also want to prove I didn’t just go along for the press buffet (chargrilled corn and cornbread) so here are a few gems: ‘I was playing frisbee with a goat; he’s a lot heavier than I thought’; ‘your grandma died doing what she loved – making toast in the bathtub’; ‘he was head over heels, which is just standing upright’; just multiply that sort of thing by around 200 and you’ve got a pretty good idea what the show is like.
There’s a moment early on in Jack O’Brian’s production when it looks like Shucked might serve as an acerbic satire on America’s capacity for self delusion. It’s set in the town of Cob County, a corn-growing community that has apparently avoided all meaningful contact with the outside world, which sounds like a solid metaphor for American isolationism, especially when the crop fails and the townspeople react with disdainful horror when plucky youngster Maizy (Sophie McShera) suggests she go out into the outside world to look for answers. The show is narrated by the amusingly inept Storyteller 1 (Monique Ashe-Palmer) and Storyteller 2 (Steven Webb), who have the air of two overgrown, overexcited children tasked with delivering a school assembly. There’s another brilliantly satirical moment when they look at each other with panicked uncertainty during their assertion that nobody owned the land when their pilgrim forefathers showed up. But after that it’s mostly just corn gags.
Arguably the plot is simply ‘corn puns’
Shucked is as good as its one-liners, which is to say that it’s very good while the one-liners are being delivered, but there’s not a lot there beyond them. The plot follows a formulaic turn, not dissimilar to Calamity Jane, as plucky Maizy ventures out into civilization (well, Tampa, Florida, a concept that’s probably funnier if you’re American), leaving her more conservative fiance Beau (Ben Joyce) behind. Eventually she crosses paths with Matthew Seadon-Young’s dodgy ‘big city’ podiatrist Gordy– that is to say he treats corns, not corn, but Maizy fails to understand the difference. Determining that Cob County seems to possess an abundance of a rare, valuable mineral that could make his debts go away, Gordy tells the now smitten Maizy that he can solve the town’s ills.
The characters are all fairly rote – despite his blank slate nature Webb’s childishly overexcited Storyteller 2 is the most original creation, although Georgina Onuorah is magnificent as Maizy’s monumentally sassy cousin Lulu. There’s barely the pretence that Beau’s brother Peanut (Keith Ramsay) is even a character: he’s just a kind of savant pun dispenser, which is saying something by this show’s standards.
The country-style songs by Brandy Clarke and Shane McAnally are left to deepen and humanise the characters a little, though it’s a mixed bag - the galloping hoedown breakdown of opener ‘Corn’ (yes, really) is one of several genuinely very amusing tunes, but other songs have an earnestness that feels completely out of place.
I can see why Shucked would have been a breath of fresh air on Broadway, where it came from leftfield with an enigmatic advertising campaign purely based on corn puns, with no explanation of what the plot was (I mean arguably the plot is in fact ‘corn puns’). But it comes to London as the opening show in Drew McOnie’s first season at the Open Air Theatre with the sense it’s less an eccentric piece of outsider art, but rather a big shiny Broadway hit. It maybe doesn’t have the underdog charm it has in the US, and its flaws are more exposed. I’d also maybe point to the fact it’s panto-like, an artform Americans are rarely exposed to but that we’re inundated with every year. In general I think it could be spikier, darker and more satirical, but presumably Horn simply isn’t into that.
Still: Shucked is very, very funny. When the laughter stops, you’re really not left with much of substance, but if you’re in the market for turning off your brain and laughing at corn for two-and-a-half-hours, this is clearly the show for you.
