Review: SHUCKED Yields a Harvest of Laughs at Benedum Center
The national tour runs through April 19 at the Benedum Center
It's safe to say Shucked sometimes feels like three different shows crammed together into one. First of all, there's a classic musical comedy not all that different in structure and story beats from famous musical romantic comedies like Oklahoma, The Music Man and The Wedding Singer (all three of which seem to be ingrained into this show's DNA to some extent). Then there's the extremely tongue-in-cheek, fourth-wall-demolishing, metafictional humor that drives much of the show, and is more in common with postmodern pieces like Title of Show or especially the irreverent, obsessed-with-defining-its-own-conventions-and-then-lampshading-them Rock of Ages. If that weren't enough, there's then a heaping portion of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour on top of all that, with puns, folksy jokes, raunchy but good-natured one-liners, and variants on "you might be a redneck if" coming almost every single line. (Fun fact: Shucked began its life as a proposed modern reboot of the Hee-Haw franchise, but quickly shook that branding off to be an original piece; see also High School Musical's origin as Grease 3.) Yes, Shucked is quite a lot of show, the kind of occasionally overbearing piece that the British sometimes call "much of a muchness." But... it's good. It's VERY good. It's a show I went into cynical about, as neither a country fan nor a rural person, but which won me over completely by about ten minutes into Act 1.
With a book by Disney and Broadway mainstay Robert Horn, and songs by award-winning country songwriters Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally (aka Kacey Musgraves's primary collaborators), Shucked has its comedy and country bona fides right out front. This pays off almost instantly, as our two emcees, Storyteller 1 and Storyteller 2 (played at this performance by Dominque Kent and Ryan Fitzgerald), welcome the audience with a tongue-in-cheek introduction. They're a pair of obvious besties, and they're very pointedly NOT what you'd expect in a rural, rustic country town: she's black, and he's loudly and overtly queer-coded. None of this is coincidental: as they explain, the show takes place in a totally isolated rural community founded by diverse outsiders centuries ago, which has grown up free of the outside world's hate and bigotry. Cob County is a redneck utopia, fueled by the bountiful corn harvests and the corn liquor distilled by master brewer Lulu (Miki Abraham). But when the harvest fails for the first time, local bride-to-be Maizy (Danielle Wade) ventures into the world outside, starting a fast-moving love quadrangle between her, her lovable lunk fiancee Beau (Nick Bailey), podiatrist-turned-con-artist Gordy (Quinn VanAntwerp), and her cousin Lulu.
Danielle Wade is immensely winning as leading lady Maizy. It's almost the exact sort of "tongue in cheek parody ingenue" role as Sherrie in Rock of Ages, but with country instead of hair metal, and Wade sings in the genre with astonishing authenticity and self-assuredness. In particular, her mastery of the "adult alternative" country sound with its mix of head voice, vocal fry and sprechstimme elements is note-perfect. At times, she's almost a vocal dead ringer for Kacey Musgraves, even as she's dropping one-liners and wonderfully absurd puns every other line. Miki Abraham matches her every step of the way as the fierce but jaded Lulu, who's proud not to need a man but is starting to wonder if she wants one anyway. Lulu's material is written about thirty years out of date with Maizy's, deliberately recalling the sounds of the 1990s girl-power country boom. Rather than Alex Newell's wild, pyrotechnically stunning rendition of "Indepdently Owned," Abraham goes for an idiomatically based one, absolutely nailing that sassy, soulful country radio sound. (When she and Wade sing together for a rare sincere moment in act 2, I closed my eyes for a moment and could swear I was hearing an unreleased duet between Kacey Musgraves and Reba McEntire.)
As Beau, Nick Bailey has the delicate task of embodying the "problematic boyfriend" without ever taking the character to a place so extreme he's hateful or irredeemable. Bailey sings with the husky, wounded voice of today's Chris Stapleton types, continuing the trend of many of the leads representing specific sounds in modern country. His comic timing is excellent, whether bouncing right off Maizy or responding a second too late when someone befuddles him. That someone is often his eccentric brother Peanut, played by Mike Nappi. Until the end, when he unexpectedly dances up a storm, Nappi is mostly playing a dialogue-based role. Peanut is both the village wise man and the village idiot, and at any given time, he is prone to rattling off a stream of Jeff Foxworthy-esque faux-proverbs like "if a man can name more than four Metallica songs... he's probably in Metallica." Stand-up comedy is a difficult thing, and character comedy adds another layer to that, so Nappi's ability to nail the rhythms of the git-r-done school of humor just as well as the guys who created it is greatly to be admired. Rounding out the main cast is Quinn VanAntwerp as Gordy the conflicted big-city con artist. VanAntwerp has an unbelievably high, effortless tenor that hits notes you never see coming, and his physical comedy and double-takes are worth the price of admission, whether he's desperately trying to move a heavy rock, or juggling phones in a pseudo-vaudeville sketch with the two Storytellers.
Shucked is not a deep show. It's a stupid show, but that doesn't make it a dumb one: a huge amount of craft and wit goes into creating something as perpetually amusing, where almost every other line is a punchline, pun or groaner. In particular, the show loves paraprosdokians, the joke structure that leads you in one direction and then abruptly veers off in a different one to change the meaning. This incessant, nonstop machine gun of joke delivery is the one thing the show still has in common with its Hee-Haw roots. (Nobody wears a hat with a price tag on it, and all the ladies have their clothes on, so the resemblance is slim at this point.) I can imagine there are some people who will inherently cringe from this kind of flippantly frivolous entertainment, but I'm not one of them- this is one city boy will proudly admit to saying yeehaw to Shucked.
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