Shucked- It’s Almost Like Sitting in a Comedy Club but One with Plot, Song and Dance

 

SHUCKED is the Tony Award®–winning musical comedy The Wall Street Journal calls “flat out hilarious!” And nobody knows funny like economists. Featuring a book by Tony Award winner Robert Horn (Tootsie), a score by the Grammy® Award–winning songwriting team of Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally (Kacey Musgraves’ “Follow Your Arrow”), and directed by Tony Award winner Jack O’Brien (Hairspray), this corn-fed, corn-bred American musical is sure to satisfy your appetite for great musical theater. Credit Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

  I can’t remember a musical I saw that had as many outstanding actors as Shucked.

Now playing at the Benedum Center in Downtown Pittsburgh, Shucked has almost as many stars as kernels on an ear of corn. Seven of them, in fact, and every one a gem.

How do you like your cornpone? This pun-filled romp through countrified terrain is densely compacted with simple, often witty, sometimes risqué humor in the Hee-Haw vein. There’s music and dancing and a plot every bit as silly, but entertaining, as a Tim Robinson sketch.

When the lights go up, we find the outline of an aging country barn located somewhere in Cob County, the epicenter of corn country., where the residents, like Medieval serfs, never venture far the place they were born.

Two story tellers, Maya Lagerstam and Joe Moeller, kind of yokel “farm to fable” tale makers, get the laughs cranked up and follow up with “Corn,” a song so thematically apt, Brandy Clark and three-time Granny Award winner, Shane McAnally, give it a reprise at the end of Act One.

2023 Tony Award nominee, Robert Horn (Tootsie), gets credit for the barrage of jokes and puns that seem to fill half the show with guffaws, laughs and chuckles galore. If you find lines like “Your grandma died doin’ what she loved…makin’ toast in the bathtub,” or “These eyebrows may not be children but I’m going to raise them,” then this show is for you.

Plot wise, the contented folk in Cob County seem satisfied with their lives until they begin to notice their corn crop is starting to die. Horrified by the thought of a missed harvest, Maizy (Danielle Wade), the only one with the gumption to get out of town, leaves her beau, Beau (Nick Bauily) behind and seeks help. She ends up in the most unlikely of places far from corn country, Tampa, where she runs into con man, Gordy (Quinn Vanantwerp) a podiatrist, another word for corn doctor, as in one who treats the type that grow on your feet, not in the field.

Shades of The Music Man and professor Harold Hill, Gordy heads back to Cob County with Maizy, pretends to fall in love, then plans to escape with the town’s unique  purple rocks, a potential source of wealth.

This new arrival, as might be expected, doesn’t sit well with Beau who gets his feelings out in “Somebody Will,” a country ballad that makes you begin to think he has the best voice of the cast.

On the other hand, some might opine that that title should go to either Wade who shines in “Maybe Love” or Lulu (Miki Abraham), Maizy’s savvy and street-smart, hardened cousin, who shows off her aggressively assertive vibe in “Independently Owned.’

If two’s company and three’s a crowd, what is four? The bucolic love triangle gets another angle when Lulu begins to share a mutual attraction to Gordy. There’s potential here for some rough and tumble goings on.

As Maizy, Wade is a not-so-dumb blonde with the spirit of a steed and the heart of a Samwise Gamgee from “The Lord of the Rings.”

Beau is a rugged, mild-mannered farm boy with a bit of countrified naivete that’s tempered by a lot of common sense. As his brother, Peanut (Mike Nappi) gets some of the evening’s best comic lines.

One problem I had in the show was catching all the rapid fire humor as it rolled off the stage and into the audience. This held true for all of the cast. and I got a bit frustrated trying to catch each pun, most of which I found entertaining. I missed too many gems despite the fact that I was wearing an audio assisted ear phone. Even so, the comedy is my favorite component of the show.

The country-pop songs are sometimes kicked up a notch or two with Sarah O’Gleby’s spirited choreography. Lighting designer, Japhy Weideman,  does a valiant job changing moods with appropriate colors and hues, and Scott Pask’s bucolic background is so evocative you can almost smell countryside wafting through in the air.

Easily digestible and downright tasty, Shucked is as light as a corn fritter. It’s a great show for just kicking back and settling into an easier, more lighthearted way of life.

Shucked, part of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s PNC Broadway in Pittsburgh series, is at the Benedum Center, 237 Seventh Street, through April 19. For tickets, phone 412-567-6666 or go to trustarts.org.