Shucked, a new musical about corn, may be the show that lifts Broadway out of its post-coronavirus funk. How do I know this? Because I keep my “ear” to the ground. If you laughed—or groaned—at that, then Shucked is for you. Loosely inspired by the old TV series Hee Haw, the show has one goal: get laughs, as many as possible, as fast as possible.
“We want to give you a fun night in the theater,” says Robert Horn, who wrote the script. “We don’t lecture.” Judging from the preview performances, Shucked, which opens April 4 at the Nederlander Theatre, is, well, poppin’.
When the box office opened, sales were “nonexistent,” a production source says. But word of mouth took off the morning after the first preview. At theater agencies up and down Broadway, junior staffers, who’d been given free tickets because the house would otherwise have been empty that night, were telling their bosses that Shucked was a hoot.
At TKTS, the discount-ticket booth in Times Square, the staff started steering tourists to Shucked while tickets could still be had. And a couple of weeks ago, Tom Stoppard, the great British playwright, was spotted entering the theater saying he was there to see “what all the fuss is about.” For the record, he had a blast.
Broadway has been struggling to regain its footing since reopening in the fall of 2021. The initial excitement of seeing new shows such as Six and beloved stalwarts such as The Lion King evaporated when coronavirus variants arose. Cast members got sick, audiences were skittish, shows closed.
Then the “We See You, White American Theater” movement—that’s what they call themselves—accused Broadway of being racist. Stung by the charge, producers rushed to put on plays that addressed the political fires of the moment. Shows such as Thoughts of a Colored Man, Ain’t No Mo’, and the return engagement of Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play opened on Broadway and died at the box office.
And now comes Shucked, with its gags, puns, groaners, and laughs. Its humor is unabashedly old-fashioned, slyly subversive, and as fast-paced as a Marx Brothers routine. One typical joke, delivered by Peanut, the town philosopher, goes, “Now, as we all know, life is a constant balancing act between wondering why you weren’t invited to something, and wondering how to get out of it.” The humor has seeped into the advertising campaign, with subway posters reading: “I saw it 300 times before it even opened! —George Santos.” Horn came up with that one.
Shucked has been kicking around since 2011, when the Opry Entertainment Group, which owns the rights to Hee Haw, hired Horn to write a musical based on the TV show. He met with several Nashville songwriters and picked Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, whose country-music hits include “Better Dig Two” and “Mama’s Broken Heart,” to write the score.
Tom Stoppard was spotted entering the theater saying he was there to see “what all the fuss is about.”
Clark and McAnally had long wanted to try their hand at a musical. “My mom introduced me to The Music Man and South Pacific,” says Clark, who grew up in Washington State. “And when I saw the touring production of The Phantom of the Opera, that was the aha moment for me.”
McAnally, who grew up in a small town in Texas, didn’t know much about Broadway until his husband took him to New York to see The Book of Mormon. “It knocked the wind out of me,” he says. “I couldn’t believe how smart and funny it was. I told my husband, ‘I want to do this.’”
Their first pass at Shucked was called Moonshine: That Hee Haw Musical. It opened in Dallas, took a critical drubbing, and died. “We were trapped by the Hee Haw brand,” Horn says. “The show didn’t have an identity.” “We were trying to write country songs that sounded like musical theater,” says Clark. “When I hear them now, I just cringe.”
Clark and McAnally went on to write more country songs and snag a bundle of Grammy nominations, while Horn turned his attention to a musical version of Tootsie, setting the story in the theater world. Noticeably, he did not lift a line from Larry Gelbart’s celebrated screenplay but instead wrote his own zingers.
“I grew up on Neil Simon and Murray Schisgal, Milton Berle and Jack Benny,” Horn says. “I love joke-driven comedy.” At one point, the tough-as-nails Broadway producer in Tootsie says: “Sometimes I wish my first husband could look down from heaven and see me now. But no, the bastard is still alive!”
Tootsie won Horn the Tony Award for best book, but he was still amassing jokes and ideas for Moonshine. He got in touch with Clark and McAnally and said they should start again but drop the Hee Haw association.
Mike Bosner, who made a tidy sum of money co-producing Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, stepped in to sort everything out. “I cleared the rights, and we made the decision to do a 180-degree turn,” he says. Bosner brought in Tony Award–winning director Jack O’Brien, whose many hits include Hairspray. O’Brien eliminated the songs that made Clark “cringe” and encouraged her and McAnally to write the way they always had.
McAnally says, “Jack said to us that this is not a big, splashy show; write songs you’d be writing in Nashville.” Adds Clark: “He is the best coach I’ve ever had.”
Horn came up with an original plot. It is, he says, “a fable” about a town long cut off from the world by its fields of corn. When the corn starts to die, the town has to open itself up to some city slickers who try to take advantage of the situation, though they soon learn that the locals are hardly yokels. It’s a delightful mix of Brigadoon, Oklahoma!, and The Music Man. Its message is simple: We can all get along.
In the meantime, there are the laughs. At the first preview, Clark and McAnally sat in the mezzanine and heard “the whoosh” of laughter, of enjoyment, McAnally says. “I wish I could bottle that sound.”
Horn, the Broadway vet, is less starry-eyed. “I’m having my hand slapped because I keep writing new jokes,” he says. “If a joke doesn’t work two nights in a row, it’s gone and a new one goes in. I’ve got enough roadkill of jokes to write six more shows.”
Michael Riedel is the co-host of Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning on 710 WOR and the author of Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway and Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway