Theater review: ‘Shucked’ is a blur of stupid merriment, and that may be just what you need

There’s no denying that the musical comedy “Shucked” brings a welcome blast of corn-growing season warmth to a week of snow and slush. And that its cast is dead set on making audiences laugh loudly and often no matter what it takes. Beyond that, this odd show, at The Bushnell through March 1, behaves like a weird mash-up of “Oklahoma” and “Urinetown” and isn’t very good for some very obvious reasons.

The plot basically doesn’t matter, but there is one: A small midwestern town that is so remote and independent, so completely engulfed by the corn stalks that provide its sole local industry that the outside world is completely unaware of it, notices that its critical corn crop is dying off. Intrepid heroine Maizie heads to the big city of Tampa, Florida in search of a “corn doctor” only to be hoodwinked by a conniving podiatrist named Gordy.

This tale is told not through fully shaped characters but through stereotypical country bumpkins and city slickers who speak mostly with dumb jokes. A sample: “Like they said at Mr. Nice Guy’s funeral: No more Mr. Nice Guy!” Or “I think people in China must wonder what to call their good plates.” Or “Your grandma died doin’ what she loved … makin’ toast in the bathtub.” An astounding percentage of these jokes involve either death or male genitalia.

One of the big problems with “Shucked” is that everyone in the show is constantly trying to be funny. There are no characters or situations to bounce the jokes off of the way The Marx Brothers or Three Stooges were always surrounded by stoic professors or stuffy authority figures. In “Shucked,” everything is a joke and nothing matters.

The closest thing to a lull in the ceaseless stream of dopey humor is the songs, which can be charming but generally don’t try to be amusing at all. The inoffensive music and lyrics are by country music star Brandy Clark and prolific country music songwriter Shane McAnally, and sound more like typical modern Broadway showtunes than country songs. They range from metaphorical ballads like “Walls” to songs of romance, friendship and independence. Some of the songs grown naturally out of burgeoning relationships between characters, as musical theater songs are supposed to. Only a handful develop from the show’s comedy routines. There are plenty of scenes, in fact, where a long, rhythmic, carefully paced burst of dialogue might have you wondering “Why isn’t that a song instead?”

Jack O’Brien, the powerhouse director behind the original Broadway production of “Hairspray,” the new tour of “The Sound of Music” coming to the Shubert Theatre in New Haven next month and lots of other musicals, knows how to set a consistent cartoonish tone that suits the relentless jokes. There’s nothing in the staging or in Sarah O’Gleby choreography that enhances that sense of humor. It’s just the strutting and prancing you’d expect from a show set on a farm.

So the play’s dialogue (credited to TV writer/producer Robert Horn, whose previous Broadway work includes “Tootsie” and “13”) is basically all comedy one-liners while the singing, and especially the dancing, don’t really try to be funny. It’s somewhat surprising then that at the very end of the show that the show suddenly expects us to care about these one-dimensional pun-spouting characters. After a two-hour tale of comical deception, betrayal, emotional cruelty, insensitivity and obliviousness, the audience is expected to swallow a message of caring and community.

Many of the jokes are funny, but mainly come in the form of dumb puns or misunderstood phrases. A character named Peanut is giving to philosophical ponderings such as “I was just playin’ Frisbee with my goat — he’s much heavier than I thought.” When anyone asks Peanut “What do you think?” the show stops cold as he reels off a list of statements that begin with “I think …,” observations which resemble the stand-up comedy stylings of Steven Wright or Mitch Hedberg.

Rather than letting the gags flit by quickly, the cast pauses endlessly after each utterance to milk the laughs.

There are two onstage narrators, not the most reliable framing device since it always reminds us of the old theater adage “Show, don’t tell.” It’s not uncommon for a show to resort to a narrator when it can’t move its plot forward any other way — the “Mean Girls” musical and Goodspeed Musicals’ recent premiere of “The Great Emu War” also took this route, with no more success than “Shucked” has — but when a show cares so little about its plot in the first place, all that verbiage is tedious and unnecessary. On Wednesday night, the narrator role of Storyteller 1 was played by and understudy, Jayden Dominique, who more than kept up with Storyteller 2, Joe Moeller, and was one of the driving forces of the performance.

The touring cast is uniformly up for the exhausting task of making joke after joke after joke while making over-the-top reactions whenever anyone else says a joke. Danielle Wade, star of both “Summer Stock” and “South Pacific” at the Goodspeed Opera House, brings as much depth as is possible to the strong-willed female romantic lead Maizie, and is well matched by Nick Bailey as her goofily brooding fiance Beau. The evil quack foot doctor Gordy is played with villainous glee and hideous leisure suits by Quinn VanAntwerp, known for playing Bob Gaudio for over 3,000 performances in the Broadway run of “Jersey Boys.” Miki Abraham is particularly well cast as Lulu, a role which won Alex Newell a Tony. Like Newell, Abraham is a Black, non-binary performer with an exquisite singing voice, playing a character who has not been given the corny comedy restraints placed on the rest of the cast. Lulu, whose big numbers are anthems of empowerment and friendship, is given room to really shine in this show, and Abraham does.

The cast is admirably diverse. There’s a line in the show about how the community formed naturally, despite a slew of jokes about how conservative the general region is, and how these Cob County citizens “knew of the outside world, they just wanted no part of it.”

“Shucked” ran for about nine months on Broadway, had a production in England last year with one coming up in Australia this year and may get turned into a movie. There is a place for “Shucked” in the theater landscape. College theaters and community theaters will doubtless flock to this harmless farm-set frolic. High schools and middle schools would probably love to do it, too, but if (as often happens) all the sexually suggestive or otherwise provocative lines get removed for moralistic reasons, there wouldn’t be much left of “Shucked” to stage.

The reason to see “Shucked” right now would be because it is a near-total distraction from current political events and weather conditions. It’s a blur of stupid merriment just when you might need it. But it fails as a sustained piece of musical theater, and that tacked-on happy ending is literally like watching corn grow.

“Shucked” runs through March 1 at The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford. Remaining performances are Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 1 and 6:30 p.m. $45.50-$174. bushnell.org.

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