NEW YORK, NY.- Puns, pundit John Oliver has said, are not merely the lowest form of humor but the lowest form of human behavior. The academy agrees. In the 1600s, no less a literary luminary than John Dryden denounced lowbrow verbal amusements that torture one poor word ten thousand ways.
You may know how that one poor word feels after seeing Shucked, the anomalous Broadway musical about corn that opened Tuesday at the Nederlander Theater. For more than two hours, it pelts you with piffle so egregious not just puns but also dad jokes, double entendres and booby-trapped one-liners that, forced into submission, you eventually give in.
Many of the puns, which I will not try to top, are of course about corn, from the title on down. The story is, after all, set in the fictional Cob County, where the locals, long isolated from the rest of the world by a wall of cornrows, live in the perfect hominy of entrenched dopiness. Or at least they do until the corn, like some of those puns, starts dying.
Thats when our plucky heroine obviously called Maizy (Caroline Innerbichler) dares to seek help in the great beyond. Jeopardizing her imminent wedding to the studly but xenophobic Beau (Andrew Durand) and ignoring the advice of her cousin, Lulu (Alex Newell), she heads to Tampa, Florida. In that decadent metropolis, she seeks agricultural assistance from Gordy, a con man posing as a podiatrist she misconstrues as a corn doctor. Being grifty, Gordy (John Behlmann) returns to Cob County with Maizy not so much to cure the crop as to reap the wealth he thinks lies beneath it: a vast outcropping of precious gemstone.
Like Gordy, the audience may have difficulty extracting the gems from the corn. For one thing, there is so much corn to process. Its not just the relentless puns. The musicals book, by Robert Horn, embracing what one of the genial songs (by the country music team of Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally) calls cornography, trades on all kinds of trite wisdom and low humor.
Low but hard not to laugh at. Beaus brother, Peanut (Kevin Cahoon), a fraction of a half-wit, fires off bullet lists of random jokes for no apparent reason. Many adhere to the formula X + Y = Pun Z. (Like the personal trainer said to the lazy client: This is not working out.) Others sound as if cerebral comedian Steven Wright had been lobotomized by the rubes of Hee Haw. I think if you can pick up your dog with one hand, Peanut twangs, you own a cat.
Hee Haw is relevant here. Shucked was originally developed as a stage version of that television variety hour, first broadcast in 1969. Set in Kornfield Kounty, it featured country music and down-home comedy at a time when rural America was becoming ripe for spoofing by urban elites such as Eva Gabor. And though the rights holders eventually backed out of the venture, and all but three of the songs were discarded, the interbred DNA of Broadway and the boonies lives on.
It makes for a strange hybrid. Somehow framed as a fable of both communal cohesion and openness to strangers, Shucked has very little actual plot, and what there is, much of it borrowed from The Music Man, is rickety. (The effect is echoed by Scott Pasks lopsided barn of a set.) Minor love complications, as Lulu falls for Gordy even though Gordy is romancing Maizy, are only as knotty as noodles. And using a pair of winky storytellers (Grey Henson and Ashley D. Kelley) to speed past potholes does not exactly make for cutting-edge dramaturgy.
Evidently the authors and director, Jack OBrien meant to glue the show together with groaners, a gutsy if not entirely successful move. As the jokes wear down your resistance, they also wear you out. Nor do they provide the narrative structure that typically gives characters in musicals reasons to sing. Maizy and Beau have some nicely turned, strongly hooked numbers, and Innerbichler and Durand perform them well, but we arent invested in them enough to care. With their needs so flat, the extra dimension of song seems like overkill.
Oddly, its only the secondary characters who are complicated enough for music well, really just one of them. Newell turns Lulu, a whiskey distiller and freelance hell-raiser, into a full-blown comic creation, which is to say a serious person who puts comedy to a purpose. If her dialogue is wittier than the others, thats partly because it engages the story, however thin, but mostly because of the intentionality of Newells delivery. Flirting with but also threatening Gordy, Lulu says, The last thing I wanna do is hurt you. She pauses and locks eyes with him. So well get to that.
Lulu also gets the shows best song, a barnburner of a feminist anthem called Independently Owned. (No disrespect to Miss Tammy Wynette, she sings, I cant stand by my man, hell have to stand by me.) Newell having absorbed the whole vocal thesaurus of diva riffs, shouts, gurgles and growls stops the show. But after the ovation, I found myself wondering what such a huge talent could do with a more commensurate role, like Effie in Dreamgirls.
Or for that matter what Shucked might have done if it had set its sights a bit higher. OBriens staging is deliberately old-fashioned, filled with simple effects and modest outlays meant to match the content but that somehow undershoot the mark. Tilly Grimes costumes, though apt enough, look as if they were thrifted. Sarah OGlebys choreography reaches its zenith right at the start, and not even with humans: A mini-kickline of plastic corncob Rockettes slays.
Still, with all its fake unsophistication, Shucked is what weve got, and in a Broadway musical season highlighted by an antisemitic lynching, a murderous barber and a dying 16-year-old, some amusing counterprogramming is probably healthy. You may even find its final moment moving, as the paradox of separation and inclusion is resolved in a lovely flash.
Just dont expect intellectual nourishment; forgive me, Im breaking my promise, but its mostly empty calories youll find in this sweet, down-market cornucopia.
Shucked
At the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; shuckedmusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.