With music by country stars Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally and a book by Robert Horn [of Tootsie fame] Shucked – a hit stateside – opens Regent’s Park’s summer season.
With its original director, Jack O’Brien, at the helm, this production zings with word play that’s oft-times bracingly blue.
Cob County’s corn crops are failing. The community is too stubborn and insular to seek help.
Tilly Grimes’ costumes are a delight as the tattooed and over-tanned Tampa residents dance alongside Maizy, brandishing a plastic crocodile. Ben Joyce is a revelation as Maisy’s rejected beau Beau when he belts out the blues-country ballad Somebody Will.
Matthew Seadon-Young plays Tampa conman, corn- fixing [yes, there are puns aplenty] podiatrist and love rival, Gordy, with impressively slick charm.
Georgina Onuorah, as Maizy’s sassy cousin Lulu, could bring the roof down (quite possibly this set’s drafty one) with her show-stopping Independently Owned.
She can hold the audience in the palm of her hand with one delayed knowing wink. Keith Ramsay as a hillbilly savant serves up endless laugh-out-loud lines with perfect deadpan timing.
There could be even more of Sarah O’Gleby’s witty choreography but the Best Man Wins hoofing hoedown is a highlight.
Staged on a rustic Americana wooden set by Scott Pask and framed by an off-tilt, slatted barn that reaches into the park’s glorious setting, it’s visually striking.
Whiskey kegs and battered number plates litter the space. Corn rows run alongside that wilt then spring into life once the town’s emotional issues are resolved.
The pacing of the gags is so fast and the humour so ballsy that plot and character development lose out. But Shucked wears its message of inclusion on it its sleeve.
It’s a simple story but ‘there is a cornfield of difference between simple and stupid.’
Shucked runs at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park until June 14.
