Review Roundup: SHUCKED at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre

Marking the start of Drew McOnie’s inaugural season, the award-winning corny musical Shucked has now opened at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre. In a small town where the cherished corn crop is fading, Shucked follows farmgirl Maizy as she seeks help by going to the big city, shaking up the town's routine and igniting a spark of change. 

Five-time Tony-winning director Jack O’Brien helms the musical comedy, Tony-winning book writer Robert Horn, and Grammy-winning country songwriters Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally. 

What did the critics think?

Shucked runs at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre until 14 June

Photo Credit: Pamela Raith

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BroadwayWorld, Cindy Marcolina: The show might be an easy giggle, ready to charm with puns galore and a corny score, but it's shuckingly mid. Every inch is tropey and formulaic, with quips that are either the low-hanging cob or the most extravagant sexual innuendo, missing the sophistication of well-calibred humour altogether. It has plenty of moments of brilliance and the company is overwhelmingly excellent, but the material isn’t as dazzling.

The Stage, Sam Marlowe: The music is generally bland – country-tinged, banjo-picking, generic show tunes – and closest O’Brien’s production comes to the elevating thrill of a big company number is Best Man Wins, in which Beau and Peanut stiffen the resolve of the menfolk to resist Gordy’s machinations while leaping on and off rolling or upended barrels, and scaling see-sawing planks of wood. Otherwise, this is all romantic moonshine and capering nonsense. Make no mistake, it’s super stoopid. But at its best, it’s also sorta super – an uncomplicated good time.

TimeOut, Andrzej Lukowski: I can see why Shucked would have been a breath of fresh air on Broadway, where it came from leftfield with an enigmatic advertising campaign purely based on corn puns, with no explanation of what the plot was (I mean arguably the plot is in fact ‘corn puns’). But it comes to London as the opening show in Drew McOnie’s first season at the Open Air Theatre with the sense it’s less an eccentric piece of outsider art, but rather a big shiny Broadway hit. It maybe doesn’t have the underdog charm it has in the US, and its flaws are more exposed. 

WhatsOnStage, Alun Hood: If exchanges like “what’s happenin’ brother?” “I just passed a huge squirrel…which is odd cos I don’t remember eating one” make you groan not guffaw, Shucked isn’t for you. Robert Horn’s Tony-nominated book for this New York import hits that humour level from the off and stays there permanently. It’s not elegant but if you’re in the right frame of mind, or maybe mindlessness, it’s pretty funny. 

The Independent, Alice Saville: The poster does have a lot of corn on it, but even so, the sheer unabashed corniness of the whole endeavour does come as a bit of a shock at first. The opening number is basically a list of puns and jokes related to the yellow stuff (I can already tell I’m going to run out of synonyms). “It’s the same going in coming out,” the peppy cast sing triumphantly, in a foretaste of the many, many indigestible scatological gags to come.

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