Lawrence Toppman

Yet any reservations about its length vanish when cast members sing and play. They really sound like rockers, not Broadway singers adapting themselves to a different vocal style, and they play Butler’s ear-catching licks enthusiastically. Not one of them was alive when Fleetwood Mac created its magnum opus, but all five render ‘70s rock ‘n’ roll as if to the manner born.

Shucked is a popcorn musical: lively, clunky, handsomely presented, good-natured, emotionally uninvolving, well-performed, overlong, heavily larded with jokes about penises and butts, occasionally quite witty yet frequently repeating aged gags from vaudeville and stand-up comedy. (‘Your horse came in at twenty to one.’ ‘Well, that’s pretty good!’ ‘The other horses came in at 12:30.’) I had a brainlessly good time I can scarcely remember two hours later, as I write this.”

And Casey Nicholaw’s tap-happy choreography, which extends even to cops and murderers, makes the musical more light-hearted than the film and justly won one of its four Tonys.

The real point of the cheerfully brainless musical at Belk Theater is to assemble more than two dozen songs by Swedish producer-writer Max Martin and his collaborators, getting the crowd to “throw your hands up in the air/And wave them around like you just don’t care.” Audience members who did so didn’t mind that author David West Read created an irrelevant subplot about a 19th-century boy band just to shoehorn “(Everybody) Backstreet’s Back” into the tale.