Shucked at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre – review

If exchanges like “what’s happenin’ brother?” “I just passed a huge squirrel…which is odd cos I don’t remember eating one” make you groan not guffaw, Shucked isn’t for you. Robert Horn’s Tony-nominated book for this New York import hits that humour level from the off and stays there permanently. It’s not elegant but if you’re in the right frame of mind, or maybe mindlessness, it’s pretty funny. Honestly, there are other Broadway musicals I expected to see here before this but I hadn’t reckoned on it being picked up by Regent’s Park where the outdoor setting adds its own sprinkling of magic, and mostly suits this (literally) corny slice of Americana.

Shucked has decent pedigree: a sleeper hit in New York two seasons ago thanks to great word-of-mouth and a cheerfully aggressive advertising campaign which plastered yellow ears of corns everywhere, it’s directed again by Tony winner Jack O’Brien. Songwriters Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally are record-breaking award-winners within the country music sphere, and only a curmudgeon wouldn’t warm to the zany exuberance of Horn’s book which frequently resembles of a list of jokes rather than a script.

The flimsy plot sees an isolated community (think Brigadoon, coming to the Park later this summer, but with Deep South accents) whose sole industry and sustenance is corn, facing obsolescence when their all-important yellow crop catastrophically starts to fail, and innocent Maizy (Sophie McShera, an endearing mixture of sunshine, cluelessness and steel) goes to the big city (Tampa, FL!) to seek help. O’Brien‘s pretty production is busy but focused, creating a world where backwoods charm cohabits agreeably with showbiz ingenuity. Sarah O’Gleby’s barnstorming choreography, homaging a plethora of familiar staging tropes, is a major factor in this. So are set designer Scott Pask’s attractive, crazily angled barn, and the colourful, heightened contributions of Japhy Weideman (lighting) and Tilly Grimes (costumes).

Alex Newell stole the show on Broadway as local distiller and self-made woman Lulu, who’s also Maizy’s cousin. It happens all over again in London with Georgina Onuorah’s equally sizzling performance, belting stratospherically and dispensing wisecracks (“these eyebrows may not be my children, but I’m gonna raise them”) with hip-rolling, world-weary aplomb. If she’s not dissimilar from her gorgeous Ado Annie in the Daniel Fish Oklahoma! well, she was spectacular in that as well.

Clark and McAnally’s melodious, intermittently punchy, score plays second fiddle to the belly laughs of Horn’s script, but successfully infuses the country genre with theatricality. Several individual numbers hit home. Ben Joyce, athletic and fabulous as Maizy’s romantic interest, fielding vocals that would rip the roof off the theatre if it had one, gets a rousing, bluesy cri de cœur in the earworm “Somebody Will” where he realises their relationship is off the rails and he might be better appreciated elsewhere. There’s an authentic showstopper in each act: Onuorah nails the spiky-sexy “Independently Owned” which is practically a feminist anthem, and in the second half the male cast cut loose on the rollicking “Best Man Wins” where O’Gleby’s choreography, making inventive use of barrels, planks and macho posturing, ups the ante to exciting effect.

Monique Ashe-Palmer and Steven Webb are goofily funny and plain adorable as a pair of camp narrators with more connection to the story than one initially suspects. The ensemble is terrific and there’s gleefully knowing work from Matthew Seadon-Young as a city slicker out to exploit the Cob County dwellers, and Keith Ramsay raises gormless philosophising to an art form as a garrulous, idiot savant farmhand.

The humour makes up in relentlessness for what it lacks in sophistication (“You can put sugar on horses**t but that don’t make it a brownie” “NOW you tell me?!”) but buy into it and you’ll laugh a lot. Stir in a tractor-trailer load of heart, several barrels of good will, foot-tapping music, and you have an appealing show, albeit one that just occasionally feels a little lost and overlong in the wide open space of Regent’s Park.

It’s the maize-based, country-tinged cutie pie of a musical you never knew you needed. Like that ubiquitous yellow vegetable, it’s only moderately nourishing but it’s sweet and surprisingly delicious.