KWIT: Shucked

 KWIT=Kent's Week In Theatre...is this actually a thing now? I mean, I said 2026 was going to be a theatre year for me... but I wasn't really serious...was I?

Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto - Friday, March 6, 2026

Unless someone (like me) tells you directly (as I'm doing now) what Shucked actually is (I will get to that in a moment), then (to me) there's really nothing appealing about a country music-infused song and dance show whose story is built around corn and whose humour is seemingly corn-based puns.

Seriously. This is how the Mirvish website promotes the show:
Join Maizy, the spunky heroine, as she battles to save her beloved crop with the help of a con man posing as a "corn doctor." Get ready for a wild ride filled with toe-tapping country tunes, side-splitting jokes and a whole lot of heart. Will Maizy save the day and find true love, or will the corny jokes be the only thing popping?

That description alone makes me feel like I've eaten a whole large bag of buttered popcorn at the theatre...heavy, bloated and a little sick to my stomach. (For some reason I had a difficult time finding someone to take my second ticket after my original theatre companion had to bail....)

When I read that description, it gives the impression that Shucked consists of, I dunno, like, puerile granny humour and Conway Twitty songs sung by a cast ensemble. It sounds utterly unpalatable.

And yet, this thing was a multiple Tony-award nominee and won for best featured actor so there's got to be more to it then that...right? I mean, the blue rinse crowd is not the main theatre crowd anymore, and grannies are, like, my mom's age, or even younger and don't share "granny" sensibilities anymore. So what actually is this thing?

What you really need to know about Shucked is that it's not *just* corny jokes and bad puns (although there are plenty of those) but that it's a show densely packed with jokes in the vein of a Tina Fey/Robert Carlock production like 30 Rock or Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (or the new, really good The Rise and Fall of Reggie Dinkins).  There's just so many jokes in this thing that if the first one makes you groan and the second one make you roll your eyes, the third one might crack and smile and the fourth one's gonna get you. Wash, rinse, repeat. When there's so many jokes, in such density, that even a 25% success ratio means you're still laughing quite a bit, and that's a pretty good time.

The structure of the show has two storytellers (Maya Lagerstam and Joe Moeller here) who narrate, interrupt, intervene and interact with the story, but aren't actual characters in the story. They are, pointedly, a black woman and gay man, speaking with southern twang, and these aspects are addressed as part of the isolated and improbably multicultural southern town of Cob County.

The story proper starts with a wedding, as Maizy (Danielle Wade) is about to marry her childhood sweetheart Beau (Nick Bailey), but during the wedding, the corn starts dying and the wedding is halted. Beau may be dim witted but he knows corn, yet he can't solve the riddle of why it's turning blue and dying. Maizy then comes up with a plan to venture out of the walls of Cob County and find outside help, even though everyone essentially tells her there's no reason to, and Beau tells her if she leaves, it's over between them.

Maizy empowers herself and heads out...to Tampa, where she meets Gordy, a largely unsuccessful flim-flam man from a family of scam artists and swindlers. He's posing as a podiatrist (advertising himself as a "corn doctor"), which is a silly scam to run, and he's in deep in gambling debts. When Maizy mistakes his advertising, Gordy sees not only an escape for his troubles, but also, from Maizy's jewelry, that Cob County may just be sitting on a minefield of rare gems.

And so the story heads back to Cob County where personalities clash and tensions raise and romantic entanglements get complicated. Jokes are told, songs are sung, and it all wraps up in a happy ending of course.

Shucked is not a spectacle of a show. The set is largely static with a few rolling corn field sections that rotate to become the "TAMPA" sign. Occasionally some barrels are rolled out or a mobile quarter-porch set, but this is not a visual show. It's a flat-out comedy, so the jokes and interplay and comedic set-ups are it's highlight.  

Beau's brother, Peanut (Mike Nappi), has a real deep, slow drawl, and often steps aside to tell a string of "Well I think" jokes which feel very Jeff Foxworthy "You might be a redneck" inspired. Again, just one type of humour employed in a show that crosses a bridge between Hee-Haw and Letterkenny. There's a sense that the show is making fun of small town southerners, or "simple folk", and at times it really, really is, but there are stabs, especially in the second act, at showing the merits of tight knit communities. "We may be simple" Beau says to Gordy, "but that doesn't mean we're stupid. That's a simple mistake stupid people make."

The book is by Robert Horn with additional compositions/lyrics by Grammy award winning powerhouse country music songwriters Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally. There are the cast ensemble songs and the story framework songs which feel like traditional musical numbers with just a little bit of twang to them, and then there are the solo numbers, the real nu-country power ballad type songs which are rather exceptional, if you like that sort of thing (though not my style).

But if the show's fullest intent is to be a comedy, then it is the songs where it falls flat for me. There's not a lot of humour in them, specifically in those big power numbers. They are, frankly, too earnest for the tone of the show. Shucked is not really all that interested in real emotions, so the big numbers are somewhat disingenuous.  I think these songs needed to be more in the Lonely Island vein where the first two verses and the chorus are the big, emotional numbers, and then the third verse takes a turn into something absurd, and the absurdity builds through the rest of the song, before abruptly coming back home to the emotional core it started with, but now completely undercut by whatever the absurdity was. 

Alas, what we have seems like musical numbers meant for people to listen to in earnest after the show. I'm sure it's been successful at that.

Shucked was an honest surprise, not remotely as cringe-inducing or saccharine or groan-evoking as I was expecting. It had a lot more bawdy humour than I was expecting, and much more cussin' than I was expecting (I still never expect swearing in musicals... one song is even titled "Holy Shit", the refrain of the song), but it's still not very provocative or challenging, I think to its detriment. It never actually deals with small town prejudices, and although it's clear that the one narrator is gay, there's nothing outwardly LGBTQ+ friendly about Cob County, it's pretty monocultural, and it likes it that way.