CIBC Theatre

Shucked – CIBC Theatre – January 11, 2025

Posted on by admin

Shucked takes place in Cob County, which may or may not be in Kansas (Cobb County is in Georgia), and very well may be taking place in August, the beginning of harvest season.

The show has cornered the market on corn and corny jokes, a veritable cornucopia, a word that originally referred to the horn of a goat, an animal that fittingly was the butt of a couple jokes in the show, as are butts and most everything else you can imagine.

I would love to see the pages of one-liners that didn’t get picked because they didn’t ripen properly. The authors should write a script, about writing a script, around the discards and call it Chucked.

I’m sure I didn’t catch all the references/homages to other Broadway shows, but I sure recognized the Shucked version of Music Man’s We Got Trouble (also set in corn country), entitled Bad, complete with rapid patter and Gordy, instead of Harold Hill, standing on a platform selling his schtick to the crowd.

Independently Owned is a show stopping song and the whole cast was great, but I was particularly impressed by their ability to stay in character and not crack up at any of the rapid fire, often groan inducing or head shaking, and frequently punishing, humor, that always contained a kernel of truth.

Boop! The Musical – CIBC Theatre – December 17, 2023

Posted on by admin

There are 25 cast members in Boop!, if you don’t count the character Pudgy (real name unknown), the dog marionette, but you should. It’s a star (as is its marionettist, Philip Huber).

There could have been no better way, on a Sunday afternoon, to avoid watching the Bears tie the NFL record for the most 10+ point 4th quarter leads blown in one season (three and counting).

Twenty-three year-old Jasmine Amy Rogers, as Betty Boop, is a star. And her 16-year-old accomplice Angelica Hale, as Trisha, has a singing voice beyond her years.

Neither of them was even born when castmate Faith Prince won her Tony in Guys and Dolls, but she’s still got it (not the cold).

As in any pre-Broadway run, tinkering continues, even after rave reviews, and cast members perform flawlessly as if nothing has changed.

One song, She Knocks Me Out, has been added since the program was printed (as evidenced in the insert), and I imagine some dialogue has been altered. What probably hasn’t been touched is the great choreography and dancing and the bonanza of technical aspects of the show.

The cost of the costumes alone probably exceeds the GNP of several small countries.

And even someone with cataracts might be blinded by the palette of colors once Betty enters the real world.

As a further bonus, one song even gives us a little captioning, ala Mitch Miller, with the aid of a bouncing ball, which never hits the ground (unlike the tragically-comedic Hail Mary pass at the end of the Bears game).