I haven’t seen it. I have a Broadway-musical-obsessed friend, though, and he says it was “dire.”
That said: it can be a lot of fun to see a show like this on its closing weekend when it’s prematurely ending. Several years ago, by total coincidence, I happened to be in the audience for the final performance of the original Broadway staging of High Fidelity, the musical adapted from the John Cusack movie (which itself was adapted from the Nick Hornby book).
It wasn’t my plan to witness the death of a flop; I had gotten my ticket months before, slotted in between other shows on a New York trip. It opened about a week before I flew in to start my performance marathon, and I saw it was being savaged by critics, but I already had my ticket so I thought, what the heck. Then when I arrived, they announced that it was a bomb and would be closing with the eleventh performance, which was the one for which I had a ticket. I knew this would be interesting trivia one day, kind of like the opposite of “I was at Woodstock!” for stage nerds, so I went.
It was horrible. It was big, expensive, glossy, energetic, and utterly, hilariously wrong headed; its derisive reviews were well earned. But it was certainly memorable in its terribleness. Also, the performance energy was next-level, as the cast apparently felt this was their last chance to prove the show wasn’t a piece of shit (even though anyone with half a brain looking at it would recognize it as such). And the audience was also fully engaged: based on lobby conversations, half were actually fans of this rattling junkwagon, while the rest were excited to be witnessing the final crash of a legendary train wreck.
For my part, I’m glad I saw it, awful as it was.
So maybe Shucked is good and maybe it’s not (my friend’s opinion notwithstanding, it has gotten some other good reviews). But the opportunity to see a major Broadway show exit the stage is interesting in and of itself.