SHUCKED Producer Mike Bosner on Saying Goodbye to Broadway

Late last season a musical came to Broadway from an unusual tryout city with a marketing campaign tied to a fruit. That same musical will leave Broadway in a month, though seemingly not because of either of the oddities I just mentioned.

“I don't question Salt Lake City for a second, I don't question our marketing for a second,” said Shucked lead producer Mike Bosner. “I’ve tried to unlock the reason why the show hasn't taken off and I don't know what that is. If I knew, I would have fixed it. No matter how many people are seeing the show and loving it, the fact that they can't really describe it to other people when they ask what it is, that feels like the sticking point. The latitude for audience members to just take a leap and go on ‘my friend says it's good, I'll go see it’ isn't quite good enough.”

When Bosner says the show “hasn’t taken off,” he means it hasn’t become a giant hit, grossing close to or over $1 million a week. But Shucked doesn’t have super high running costs and has made some money many of its weeks on Broadway—in the last ten weeks its average gross was $746,812—which is more than a lot of shows can say. And more than I necessarily would have predicted of this show before it started.

For industry insiders, Shucked came to Broadway with some baggage. Librettist Robert Horn and songwriters Shane McAnally and Brandy Clark first worked together on a Hee Haw-inspired musical, Moonshine, which flopped when it had its world premiere in 2015. Shucked was billed as a new musical, unaffiliated with the last one—and Bosner stands by that—but a few songs are the same and there are other similarities (character names, a similar setting, etc.). That means some were wary.

Then the show chose to tryout at the Pioneer Theatre Company in Salt Lake City, away from high-profile critics. The venue seemed ideal to the team—it cost a lot less than a tryout at a major regional and let them develop the work in a quieter setting. The industry had doubts about a musical from Utah. The majority of these particular naysayers were quieted when the show opened in New York. Shucked came to Broadway with a mystery component that a tryout at La Jolla would not have allowed it. And, additionally, it received mostly positive reviews on Broadway, so it isn’t the type of show you can look at and say “if only they had changed the show in X way” about. I doubt the not great New York Times review would have been different with any of the types of tweaks that usually come after a tryout.

Most of the public of course knew none of this—they knew corn (classified by botanists as a fruit). The entire show was staked on the appeal of corn. For months, even I had no idea what the show was about beyond corn. People saw corn on posters, on TV, on social media. Shucked began to have name recognition, something virtually unheard of for an original musical without stars.

Potential audience members also saw ads promoting low-cost previews, an old Broadway favorite that had fallen out of vogue in recent decades because of high weekly running costs. Shucked's utilization of them helped the Nederlander Theatre be packed all during previews. (Full houses benefit all shows, but are especially advantageous to comedies.)

“I will try to incorporate something similar on every show I do from here on out,” Bosner said. “Because again, it comes down to strategically betting on your show. You're betting on the word of mouth of the show. We wanted to make the show the star.”

That was the idea behind the corn—you get interest up, some people go, they don’t expect much because they have no idea what they are walking into, they are pleasantly surprised, they tell other people. Shucked changed advertising agencies during performances, but the corn remained.

“That low expectation when you come in and the show over delivers on what you think it’s going to be has helped our growth during our run,” Bosner said.

The Tonys also helped. Bosner was very vocal about his belief that the Tonys should go on, even with the writers' strike. Shucked received nine Tony nominations, which helped it at the box office, and the show also had a bump after the telecast, even though it didn’t win the big award. (The musical’s ads did promote it as a Tony Award-winning musical, because featured performer Alex Newell won.) 

Nevertheless, despite mostly positive reviews, a Tony bump, and fairly good word of mouth, Shucked never had hit momentum. Bosner said the audiences skewed younger during previews, but its audience has been a fairly standard Broadway audience. It’s a show that is often on the “to see” list of people I speak to, but rarely at the top of those lists. Some have queried whether the corn campaign in a way hurt the show. It definitely put it on the map, but it didn’t necessarily tell people enough about the show for them to want to buy tickets. If, as Bosner said, part of the problem is people can’t describe the show, the marketing might have contributed to that. There is a way to describe Shucked as a pure romantic comedy, but, currently, you cannot do that separate from corn.

“The marketing was very specific, but if that’s going to be painted as the mistake I’ve made, I’ll happily own that,” Bosner said. “We've done an outrageous amount of research throughout the show being on Broadway and it actually corroborates everything that we've been doing in the marketing space. The more you talk about the show and the more you show the show, people lose interest.”

Bosner said his research proved the show was better off with “brand awareness” and a focus on audience experience. So that’s what they did. But then we’re still back to wondering why the show didn’t take off the way the team had hoped.

If the sticking point was people being unable to describe the show, even after seeing it, would anything have helped? Bosner has replayed all the decisions, has looked at it a bunch of ways, but still isn’t sure. He loves the show, so he doesn’t place blame at the feet of the team. He still considers all the major decisions he made the right ones. I even questioned him on whether he regretted not putting in a “name,” as I heard a couple from the music world were interested, but he does not. He notes that the show came “at a tough time,” but isn’t sure whether that was it either. Despite a lot of happy patrons, it just "didn't click with audiences" the way the team had hoped.

In the end, closing January 14 seemed like the right move. The show was already planning to close when it launched the Reba McEntire-led commercials in late September. Bosner believes the campaign has been effective, but the numbers still haven’t changed his mind. Nor did the significant bump he saw in daily wrap after the show’s performance on the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

He said closing the show now enables him to return a “substantial amount” of the $14.5 million he raised for Shucked back to the investors. There were rumors that The Nederlander Organization forced Shucked out in favor of Tommy. However, the show didn’t hit its stop clause and Bosner denied that the theater owner made the closing decision (although Tommy did have an obvious appeal for the Nederlanders).

“We were never asked to leave the theater and the Nederlanders have been nothing but great partners on this show from day one,” he stated. “We're leaving because it's the right decision for the show and it's showing in the business that we're doing as we enter our final month now.”

Bosner said the bullish part of him wanted to hold on, but the responsible part felt this was best. He didn’t seriously consider moving the show to another Broadway venue, which would have cost millions. He made the painful decision that January should be the end to the Broadway production.

“I just thought going into the winter, and with the outrageous amount of new shows that are coming to market, that I didn't want to fight that fight,” he said. “The more conservative choice for my investors and my team was to do it this way and it's proven to be correct because we’re going to go out on a high.”

Meanwhile, Broadway has served as a launching pad for Shucked. There are productions  planned for a Cameron Mackintosh theater in the West End in the Winter of 2025, and a mounting in Sydney, Australia in Spring of 2026. Also, just last week, Shucked announced its North American tour will kickoff in Nashville in November 2024. There will be small design and script adjustments made for those productions. Bosner is not yet sure whether Lulu will continue to be cast with a non-binary, gender-nonconforming actor, because he said the team never had in mind doing that in the first place; they simply went with the best person for the role. He did say they plan on using McEntire, who is a huge fan of the show, as a spokesperson in the future, given her national and international appeal. As to a possible resident production in a place like Branson, Missouri, which might seem a natural fit, Bosner is open to such a thing down the line, but right now is focused on launching “big tentpole commercial theatrical productions around the world.”

“I love it,” Bosner said of Shucked. “It’s the perfect representation of what I love in the theater. I, of course, am sad to see it go and leave Broadway, but at the same time I’m so incredibly proud of the run we’ve had on Broadway, what we've created, and the life ahead. I take solace in knowing that we’ve created a huge future for the show that wouldn’t have been possible without the Broadway run.”

Industry Trends Weekly is a short column that runs in the weekly Industry Pro Newsletter. To read past columns and subscribe https://cloud.broadwayworld.com/rec/ticketclick.cfm?fromlink=2263077&regid=&articlelink=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.broadwayworld.com%2Ftopic%2FIndustry-Pro?utm_source=BWW2022&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=article&utm_content=bottombuybutton1. If you have an idea for the column, you can reach the author at cara@broadwayworld.com.

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