'Shucked' review — this riotously funny country-and-western musical is a huskily entertaining joy

Read our review of Shucked, starring Sophie McShera, Ben Joyce and Georgina Onuorah, now in performances at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre to 14 June.

You’d have to be the most rabid carnivore imaginable not to have a good time at Shucked, the corn-intensive country-and-western musical that charmed Broadway two years ago. Nominated for nine Tony Awards, the show, originally touted locally as a West End entry under the auspices of Cameron Mackintosh, has instead crossed the Atlantic to inaugurate Drew McOnie’s tenure as the incoming artistic director of Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre.

The alfresco setting turns out to be ideally suited to this self-described “farm to fable” of the American heartland – Cob County (geddit?) to be exact – that is inexplicably beset by a wilting crop of their all-important crop: you guessed it, corn. What to do? Send the innocent Maizy (geddit again?) to Tampa, Florida – well, why not? – where she falls under the sway of a con (corn?) artist, Gordy (Matthew Seadon-Young), posing as a podiatrist.

Gordy, true to his putative profession, hotfoots it to Cob County to lend an, um, hand. Upon arrival, he gets ensnared in a thickening amorous intrigue that includes Maizy’s intended, Beau (the strong-voiced Ben Joyce, in a very different guise to his role in Back to the Future), and her lifelong chum, and cousin, Lulu (Georgina Onuorah), with whom Maizy is on the outs.

Add in Beau’s brother, Peanut (a saucer-eyed Keith Ramsay in a sensational supporting turn), who prefaces every absurd apercu with a seriously intoned “I think”, and you have a good-hearted musical theatre hoedown that marries Robert Horn’s determinedly racy, riotously funny book to a tangy, twangy score from C&W veterans Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally.

Here, as in New York, it’s cheering to note the commingling of seasoned showbiz vets like Horn (a Tony winner for Tootsie) and the director Jack O’Brien, himself a fabled Broadway name, with newcomers to the genre like the composer-lyricist team, who in their own ways are as fresh-faced and unsullied as their sparky heroine, Maizy. She, in turn, is played by a gamely winsome Sophie McShera, best-known as the kitchen maid Daisy in Downton Abbey.

Beautifully served here by Katy Richardson’s five-piece band, the score couples power ballads like Lulu’s anthemic, take-no-prisoners “Independently Owned” – which brought a Tony to Broadway originator Alex Newell and is sent soaring into the night sky this time out by Onuorah – with the more plaintive “Walls”, in which Maizy faces up to the limitations of small-town isolationism. “Somebody Will” lets Joyce’s Beau blast his self-worth to the sheaves of wheat and beyond, while “We Love Jesus” could charm a prayer book out of the hands of MAGAts and metrosexuals alike.

Indeed, one of the perhaps undersung virtues of the piece is its evenhandedness: whereas you might expect the show to patronise the homespun citizenry on view, the material even at its most outré (which is quite often) always regards its characters with respect. Beau comments at one point on the “cornfield of difference between simple and stupid” and, as with The Book of Mormon, you feel the creators’ abiding affection for a world that less savvy showpeople would be content merely to lampoon.

The prevailing message, too, is one of tolerance and love – that last quality, like corn, said to benefit from ripening. And just when you think the show might tilt toward the treacly or the overly earnest, along comes a joke or two or ten to lighten the mood.

I can’t recall another production in recent years with so many lines ripe for the picking. I remain partial to the proviso from the ever-winning Seadon-Young’s Gordy: “Like the lazy dentist said, ‘Brace yourself’”. Elswhere, we find a thermometer joke that is best left unvisualised and that is rivalled by the description of someone possessing the body of a “30-year-old” (pause) “sofa”. Shows rarely come more heartily – huskily, even – entertaining than Shucked.

Shucked is at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre to 14 June. Book Shucked tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk.

Photo credit: Shucked (Photos by Pamela Raith)