You could tell a story of American culture through corn, tracing it through the first Thanksgiving, bourbon, the Iowa caucuses, the stalks “as high as an elephant’s eye” that heralded the modern musical and were plowed over to build a field of dreams in Hollywood, which has been propped up by a high-calorie buttered version — eventually landing at a 2022 viral video in which a child eloquently points out that the “big lump with knobs” “has the juice.”
This history serves as the ethanol fuel for the musical “Shucked,” along with good spirits and every corn pun you could imagine. Producers probably see its North American tour, now running through spring 2026, as the ideal expression of the Broadway show, a unifying offering for a divided country. It’s set in Cob County, a place where everyone lives “in perfect hominy.” Or, as one character puts it, “where Roe versus Wade is a debate about the best way to cross a small river.”
This week it’s at Washington’s National Theatre, where it was booked for a 2020 pre-Broadway tryout that was canceled because of the pandemic. (It went to Utah in 2022 instead.) It’s the rare musical that can make you laugh at regular intervals, in the first act at least — but to the point where whenever the main characters were onstage, I found myself eager for the narrators (Nick Raynor in this performance, and Maya Lagerstam) or a bit player named Peanut (Mike Nappi) to come back and feed us more wordplay. Some jokes may be too cringey or raunchy or, yes, corny — but there is always another coming.
The book, by Robert Horn (a veteran of the musicals “13” and “Tootsie”), recounts how Cob County’s dying corn crop prompts Maizy (Danielle Wade) to defy her fiancé (Jake Odmark), leave town to seek help and eventually find a big-city podiatrist (Quinn VanAntwerp) she mistakenly believes will be their savior. Horn teamed up with Nashville mega-songwriters Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, who have worked with the likes of Miranda Lambert and Kacey Musgraves and gave the show a country flavor.
They initially collaborated on “Moonshine: That Hee Haw Musical,” which was based on the variety show and premiered in Dallas in 2015. Unsatisfied, they transformed it into “Shucked,” which earned nine Tony nominations in 2023. The creative team changed some jokes for the tour, and replaced a song called “We Love Jesus” with the more story-focused “Ballad of the Rocks.”
The standout tunes are the opening number, featuring a corn kickline, and an ode to the glories of Tampa. An empowerment anthem sung by Miki Abraham, playing Maizy’s cousin, blows everyone away (and on Broadway won Alex Newell a Tony). But eventually they just plod along — the girl’s love song, the guy’s love song, the friendship song, the villain song — making me wish that they had more giddy energy to match the rest of the script, or that the characters made me more emotionally engaged in the ballads. A lot could have been solved by making the podiatrist less of a hapless lump and more like the charismatic Harold Hill in “The Music Man.”
It ends up feeling like a fleeting curiosity rather than a “Little Shop of Horrors”-style camp classic. And, yes, with many, many puns. The script offers its own guidance: “Like the lazy dentist said, ‘Brace yourself.’”
Shucked, through Sunday at the National Theatre in Washington and through spring 2026 on a North American tour. Around 2 hours 20 minutes, with intermission. shuckedmusical.com.
