Life
Shucked, review: ‘Not quite the cream of the crop’
This is an entertaining musical comedy, and its corny gags are fun, but only fleetingly does it soar
May 29, 2025 15:06
This is an entertaining musical comedy, and its corny gags are fun, but only fleetingly does it soar
May 29, 2025 15:06Screenwriter Robert Horn has written more gags in this award-winning American musical comedy than you can shake a pitchfork at.
Set in the fictional Cob County named after the corn crop that sustains this small town’s people (not to be be confused with the real-life Cobb County, which was named after a Mr Cobb), the show is populated by god-fearing folk who make it a virtue never to leave home. However, when the crop fails country girl Maizy (brilliant!), who is about to be married to her beau called Beau (excellent), decides it is time to break through the barrier of 10-foot-tall corn and defy Beau by seeking help from strangers.
In the (relatively) big city of Tampa she finds a fake corn specialist called Gordy who swindles people by treating the kind of corns that grow on feet. Despite the sign showing a foot and its bunion Maizy thinks she has found her man. And when Gordy learns that her bracelet of precious stones was made from mineral deposits in the land around her home he accompanies her back to fill his boots. Once in Cob he fakes knowing how to cure the other crop while sizing up how to harvest the rocks he thinks (mistakenly it turns out) will make him rich.
Set beneath a cavernous barn that leans more than the Tower of Pisa, Horn’s original story is set to a perky country score by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally. But only once does the music raise the metaphoric roof of this open-air venue: when Ben Joyce’s jilted Beau superbly delivers the number Somebody Will with a voice that stills the park’s trees and silences the birds.
It happily bowls along, and like tumbleweed you never want to take your eye off it until it is out of view. But it also about as light and empty
Directed by Jack O’Brien, whose New York production garnered nine Tony nominations, it becomes increasingly clear why it only managed to bag the one, which was for a performance by one of the original American cast. The show happily bowls along, and like tumbleweed you never want to take your eye off it until it is out of view. But it is also about as light and empty.
The Open Air’s previous show was a revival of Fiddler on the Roof, which won the Best Musical Revival award. The shows are only comparable in that they both attempt to prove the storytelling rule that universal appeal is attained through stories set in specific, niche even, worlds: the Jewish shtetl in Fiddler and isolated small town rural American hicksville here.
But although Horn’s story touches on a big message that insular, inward communities do not thrive, any hope of applying the lesson beyond the place in which this story is set – Trump’s America First policy? – fades because the dramatic stakes are so low.
Whether Maizy gets back with Beau, and whether local whisky maker Lulu – Georgina Onuorah who superbly delivers the second best song of the evening – ends up with the inevitably redeemed conman Gordy (Matthew Seadon-Young) is of only passing interest. Shucked pleases, but only fleetingly soars.
Theatre: Shucked
Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park
★★★