Horn, who gets credit (or blame) for the randy puns and dad jokes in “Shucked,” comes to his comedy honestly. The fact that they were proud, gay, out country artists was appealing to me, because I knew I wanted this to be a show about outliers.” “They have the same sense of humor that I do. When Horn met McAnally and Clark, “it was love at first sight,” Horn said in a phone interview. But I don’t know what it is or how you do it.’” “I said to my husband, ‘I want to do that. “But I thought you had to have a music pedigree to be a Broadway composer.”Īnd McAnally had recently become a musical theater convert after seeing his first Broadway show, “The Book of Mormon.” “It blew my mind,” he said. “Writing a musical was always on my bucket list,” she explained. (“We have some Harold Hill going on,” she acknowledged with a laugh.) Growing up in Washington State, she was in a community production of “The Music Man,” another show about a slick con man trying to bilk small towners. “We want to do this,” he recalled them saying.Ĭlark, who moved to Nashville in 1997, was just starting a sterling career as a highly acclaimed solo artist. He’d prepared a lengthy outline, but they didn’t even read it. The person first tasked with creating the adaptation was Horn, who’d written and produced lots of television shows, as well as the book (with Dan Elish) for the Broadway musical “13.”Īfter making progress with the story, Horn traveled to Nashville in 2013 to meet the city’s top songwriters, including McAnally and Clark. Executives at the Opry Entertainment Group, which owns the rights to “Hee Haw,” thought that the TV show’s mix of music and cornpone comedy might adapt well to the stage. Magoo path to opening night, but the back story to “Shucked” features more flat tires and head-on collisions than most. The show is both about corn, and corny in an audacious way. Horn, who won a Tony Award in 2019 for writing the stage adaptation of “Tootsie,” unabashedly filled “Shucked” with corn puns - the leading lady is named Maizy, she hails from Cob County, and that’s just the start of it. They began writing songs about a decade ago for a different iteration of the musical, which the book writer Robert Horn had been working on since 2011. The New York Times music critic Jon Caramanica called them “two of the most in-demand and disruptive songwriters” in Nashville and “convention-tweakers in a town in thrall to its conventions.” 1 on the Billboard country chart, and she has 11 Grammy nominations. He’s co-written or produced 39 songs that reached No. McAnally and Clark, who composed the show’s music and wrote the lyrics, are two of Nashville’s most successful musicians.
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