Matthew Murphy & Evan Zimmerman
How many jokes—really good jokes, really good funny jokes, really good terrible jokes, really excellent silly jokes—can you stuff into a Broadway musical? In Shucked (Nederlander Theatre, booking to Sept 3), they are deliciously relentless. Accompanying their shameless deployment—Robert Horn is responsible for the musical’s hilarious book—are Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally’s songs, which are not only just as funny as the jokes but also immediately hummable ear-worms (it was announced yesterday the cast album will be available digitally from May 5, and on CD June 9).
Top of those tunes is the number that brings the show to a whooping, cheering, standing-ovation standstill. Emmy-nominated Glee and Once on This Island star Alex Newell—Shucked’s standout performer—earns this Broadway season’s first show-stopping moment for the roof-raisingly wonderful belter, “Independently Owned.”
The pleasure of watching Shucked is not only that it’s very funny, it is also a musical comedy comfortable in its merry skin, thanks to Jack O’Brien’s equally mischievous direction, full of stop-starts, playing to the audience, and letting the jokes and reaction to the jokes breezily pace the show. The show’s witty advertising campaign—one commercial featured a quote ascribed to George Santos, “I saw it 300 times before it even opened!”—matches the end-goods in the best way. “Zany” is a word to be used with critical caution, but Shucked merits it. Grafted around the jokes is a story about lovers at odds and a small, proudly hick town with a failing corn harvest, but the joy of the show is not really in that story—it is sitting back and drinking in Shucked’s ridiculousness, and its ridiculous sense of fun.