Broadway hit is corn-ucopia of cringe puns and silliness

Grammy-winning writing duo Shane McAnally and Brandy Clark elevate a seemingly scriptless Shucked’, an absurd and very American tale, with tremendous tunes

- Alice Saville

A couple of years ago, Americans started posting pictures online with the caption: “The European mind cannot comprehend.” Gas stations with 120 pumps, dystopian strip malls, hot dog-flavoured water... yup, it’s true, there are still some things that even a near-century of US cultural exports hasn’t prepared us for. Underground Broadway hit musical Shucked feels like a belated addition to that list. It’s a folksy, pun-filled, and very, very American musical comedy about Southern life that, much like a steaming bowl of grits, is probably delightful if it’s the kind of thing you were raised on.

The poster does have a lot of corn on it, but even so, the sheer unabashed corniness of the whole endeavour does come as a bit of a shock at first. The opening number is basically a list of puns and jokes related to the yellow stuff (I can already tell I’m going to run out of synonyms). “It’s the same going in coming out,” the peppy cast sing triumphantly, in a foretaste of the many, many indigestible scatological gags to come.