Outside the Nederlander Theater last Saturday night, hundreds of eager ticket holders lined up for the new Broadway musical “Shucked.” What exactly was the plot of the show? Few in the crowd seemed sure.
“I just know it is about corn,” said Roe Woolf, who was visiting from Nashville.
Apparently, that was enough of a draw. “Who doesn’t like corn?” said Danielle Chamberlin, who had come in from Clayton, N.J.
Food has long been a staple of Broadway musicals. “Carousel” has a clambake. “Oliver!” has gruel. “Waitress” and “Sweeney Todd” have pies, both fruit- and flesh-based. But “Shucked” seems to be the first to star a vegetable.
An ear of corn, its gilded kernels shimmering like a yellow brick road, dominates the marquee. The in-house merchandise store sells key chains, magnets, hats and tote bags all adorned with corn. The bar serves Corn Nuts, candy corn and corn-themed cocktails like Honk if You’re Corny and Corn to Be Wild.
Onstage, corn serves as a story line, a punchline, a prop, a pun, a sexual innuendo and an emblem of the play’s cornball sense of humor. In the sprightly opening number, “Corn,” cobs stand in as microphones, babies, penises and, most memorably, a kickline. The cast belts lyrics like: “Candy corn, kettle corn, put it in your mouth, it’s the same goin’ in comin’ out.”
The show’s fictional setting? Cob County. The protagonist’s name? Maizy. Oh, and about that plot: The livelihood of this bucolic community depends on corn, but the crops are dying and no one knows why.
“We didn’t set out to be a corn musical,” said Robert Horn, who wrote the show’s book and won a Tony Award in 2019 for his musical adaptation of “Tootsie.” “And yet it became the perfect metaphor and the perfect backdrop.”
“Shucked,” which opened on April 4, has set off something of a grain mania among its fans: Some arrive dressed like ears of corn. Others applaud using corncobs, or bring cans of corn for the actors to sign after the show.
“It has revived a conversation about this sweet little golden vegetable,” Mr. Horn said.
The seeds of the show were sown in 2013, when Mr. Horn wrote a musical adaptation of the country-music TV variety show “Hee Haw.” A few years later, he decided to write a musical comedy about an isolated town in rural America, so he overhauled the “Hee Haw” show with the country-music composers Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally.
Mr. Horn wanted an element to symbolize the divide between the town and the rest of the country, and immediately thought of a staple of American agriculture: cornfields. Also, he said, “the hard K sound is a funny sound in comedy.”
After the composers wrote “Corn,” the opening song, “it sort of, pardon the pun, grew from there,” Mr. Horn said. “We started to say, ‘We want corn in every part of the show.’”
He wasn’t thrilled at first about the proposed title, “Shucked.”
“I said, ‘They are going to think of oysters.’”
Last August, while the cast and crew were preparing for the Broadway run, a video from the web series “Recess Therapy” went viral. It featured a 7-year-old New York City boy, Tariq, describing his love for corn.
A musical centered on corn suddenly carried more cultural weight, Mr. Horn said. (Tariq, known on the internet as Corn Kid, even attended the premiere of “Shucked,” and the lyrics to “Corn” quote him: “It’s got the juice.”)
That momentum — coupled with the show’s cryptic marketing campaign, which reveals little of the plot except for corn — has helped bring the crowds. On a recent night, the mile-a-minute jokes elicited escalating choruses of laughs.
“It is a little genius, because corn is a food that everyone can connect to,” said Dela Murphy, a financial adviser from Portland, Maine, who was seated in the orchestra. And what of the puns? “I don’t think they are corny at all.”
Ms. Clark said she and her fellow composer, Mr. McAnally, made some tough calls about which corn-themed lyrics felt clever enough to keep. They cut one song, “Things About to Get Corny,” which rhymed “corny” with “horny,” “porn-y” and “forlorn-y.”
“Corn is the weirdest word to rhyme,” Mr. McAnally said.
Caroline Innerbichler, who plays Maizy, said she appreciated that alongside the puns, corn supplies an accessible metaphor for a story about community and small-town America. “That grounds this farce in a lot of reality,” she said.
The show’s narrators (played by Ashley D. Kelley and Grey Henson) even address a darker side of the corn business in a closing line: “Love is a lot like corn,” they say. “It takes time to grow. But once it does, it nurtures and sustains us, until we turn it into something toxic that shortens our lives and makes us fat.”
A serious note, to be sure. The show “has hidden this great truth in these jokes that are so universally funny and digestible,” said Mr. McAnally, who nonetheless couldn’t resist going for the laugh line: “Which corn is not.”
