'Shucked' is too funny to be corny

The songs and voices delight in a hilarious Broadway musical now at the Pantages.

- CHARLES MCNULTY

JAKE ODMARK portrays Beau and Danielle Wade plays Maizy, Cob County sweethearts on the verge of marriage, in the North American tour of "Shucked."

Corn is no stranger to Broadway musicals. In “Oklahoma!,” the crop is “as high as a elephant’s eye,” according to the down-home idiom of the show’s opening number, “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.”

But in “Shucked,” the hilarious countrified musical that brought “Hee Haw”-style comedy in a modern guise to Broadway, corn finally gets top billing. The North American tour production, which opened last Wednesday at the Hollywood Pantages, is a folksy farcical riot, wholesome enough for widespread appeal but with just enough flamboyant oddity to tickle the funny bone of urban sophisticates.

DANIELLE WADE is Maizy, left, and Miki Abraham plays Lulu in the North American tour of "Shucked." The Broadway musical, with a score by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally and book by Robert Horn, is staging performances in Los Angeles until early September.

The book by Robert Horn (who won a Tony for his exuberantly witty book for the musical version of "Tootsie") employs two narrators.

Storyteller 1 (Maya Lagerstam) and Storyteller 2 (Tyler Joseph Ellis) are our guides to this "farm to fable" tale about "a simple place that time forgot," Cob County. The exact coordinates of this backwater are a bit hazy, but Storyteller 2 helpfully pinpoints the locale as "a place where being from somewhere is who you are." Cob County, as the name suggests, is corn crazy. The town's livelihood depends on a flourishing crop, but just as the local sweethearts, Maizy (Danielle Wade) and Beau (Jake Odmark), are about to tie the knot, the corn starts shriveling up.