“Shucked” at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre
Mark Shenton in North London
21 May 2025
In the 1943 musical Oklahoma! that revolutionized the Broadway musical the corn in that eponymous, then newly emerging state stood (in Oscar Hammerstein II’s gorgeous lyric) “as high as an elephant’s eye”. In Shucked, a considerably more throwaway but nevertheless surprisingly fun (and frequently funny) 2023 musical, which ran on Broadway for just over nine months, the corn crop is wilting badly, imperilling the local community and the economy of Cob County. Like a menopausal virgin spinster looking for a solution to her predicament, the answer may lie in a trip to the big city and finding romance.
Photo credit: Pamela Raith.
Except our heroine here – named (what else?) Maizy – leaves her betrothed Beau behind as she heads to Tampa, where she sees a sign for a corn doctor, and thinks he might be able to provide the answer to her town’s problems, but instead finds herself plunging feet-first (in every sense) into a whole new way of upending her life.
It is, as you’ll have gathered, a very silly show, and Robert Horn’s book matches it with a veritable wall-to-wall run of variously ribald and very silly jokes. It’s billed as a musical comedy, and for once that moniker is entirely accurate. A sampler platter: “I was so poor that if I wasn’t born a boy I’d have had nothing to play with”; “Like the receptionist at the dementia clinic said: Who does he think he is?”; “If life was fair, mosquitoes would suck fat instead of blood”; “Marriage is just two people coming together to solve problems neither of them had before”. I won’t spoil the show by quoting more of them, but you get the idea: they’re not exactly great, yet as they steamroller over the audience, resistance becomes futile.
And what Jack O’Brien’s bright, agile production has in abundance, just as his biggest stage hit Hairspray did, is real heart and some soul. Though the score of Nashville-based songwriters Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally is no match for the pastiche Sixties glories of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman’s work on Hairspray, there is plenty of heartfelt sincerity here that is worn on its sleeve to provide respite from the script’s seemingly endless parade of jokes.
They’re punchily put across by a cast mainly made up of a younger generation of new West End talents, including Monique Ashe-Palmer and Steven Webb as a pair of engaging narrator storytellers (who can’t resist joining in with the fun), the delightful and sure-voiced pairing of Ben Joyce (who previously starred in Back to the Future), and Sophie McShera as Beau and Maizy, who get plenty of ballads between them, and the showstopping belting of Georgina Onuorah as Maizy’s best friend Lulu. There are also eye-catching contributions from Matthew Seadon-Young as the podiatrist Gordy and Keith Ramsay as Beau’s brother Peanut.
Sarah O’Gleby’s choreography provides its own share of visual gags, including a terrific number danced by a line-up of corn on the cobs. Scott Pask’s rustic canopy of a set is both elegant and functional.
As director/choreographer Drew McOnie initiates his tenure as artistic director at Regent’s Park, it’s notable that he’s boldly chosen to offer the UK premiere of a new Broadway musical, with another musical outing to come when he revives the Lerner/Loewe’s 1947 Scottish Highlands classic Brigadoon in a newly revised version.
The Open Air Theatre could become a major home for musicals on his watch, capitalizing on its previous track record that this summer will see its revivals of both Fiddler on the Roof and Evita returning to London (for further runs at the Barbican and London Palladium respectively). I for one am thrilled.
