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[0:00] Robert Bannon: Are you ready? It's the round table with me, Robert Bannon. Well, welcome to the round table, everybody. My name is Robert Bannon, and you're listening to us on Broadway World over here on the Broadway Podcast Network, iHeart and Spotify. When I moved last year from New York to Detroit, Michigan, people said you would never see great Broadway shows again. You're leaving the musical theater world behind. And I'm here to tell you that is a lie. Because my friends at Broadway in Detroit have the most incredible lineup. And this holiday season, when you're tired of your family, and you've eaten some corn souffle, casserole, creamed corn, corn on the cob, corn nuggets. I tried to make a list of corn food.

You'll be ready to celebrate the corn and the love and the magic and the laughter that is Shucked. I think I want to play Lulu in my next life. I don't think I have the range, but I want to try. Look, everybody at the Legendary Fisher Theater, you need to get your tickets. And then across the country, Shucked is touring across the country. It is the funniest show. Robert Horn wrote a joke a second, literally. We have the incredible star of the show, Nick Bailey, here to tell us all about it. Nick, welcome to the show.

[1:06] Nick Bailey: Hi, thank you so much for having me.

[1:08] Robert Bannon: How many corn dishes did I forget?

[1:12] Nick Bailey: A lot of Hush Puppies.

[1:13] Robert Bannon: Is that corn?

[1:14] Nick Bailey: I don't know what else is in corn. I think puppies is corn.

[1:18] Robert Bannon: You're right on. Well, I'm excited that you're spending the holidays with us here in Detroit. I'm really looking forward to it. Are you guys gonna have snow for us or no?

[1:27] Nick Bailey: It's gonna be cold and it's going to snow.

[1:30] Robert Bannon: Well, I'm looking forward to it. I haven't had a white Christmas in a little while, so I'm very excited for that. Where are you from originally?

[1:36] Nick Bailey: I am from a little town in North Carolina that's close to Asheville.

[1:41] Robert Bannon: Okay, so do you growing up in the I guess that's the South?

[1:45] Nick Bailey: It's the South?

[1:46] Robert Bannon: Yeah.

[1:48] Nick Bailey: So you feel relatable to the Shucked story? Did you grow around farms? Did you grow around farmers and crops and small town USA?

[1:57] Nick Bailey: My father grew up in the tobacco fields of North Carolina on the eastern part of the state. And so agriculture has, and my grandfather was a tobacco farmer, so agriculture runs deep in my family. But where I grew up, the only thing that we grow really are apples, so no corn, but still a lot of farm folks. But one of the debates among the cast and creative of our show is where does the show take place? Because audiences like to say, well, this is definitely in the south somewhere, and then our writer Robert Horn, he is very adamant that it takes place in the Midwest. This is like Kansas or Iowa, and if you were able to get up on stage and look at the very back of our set, there are a couple of license plates that are hung in the barn that is our set, and one of them says Iowa, one of them says Kansas, but none of them say North Carolina. So we know it's not set in North Carolina.

[2:58] Robert Bannon: Okay, so look, you got look, and I'm whatever Robert Horn says, that's Tony winner, Robert Horn, everybody. He wrote incredible shows. He is brilliantly funny, and this show is so incredibly funny. Nick, I have to admit, when I first when it first came to Broadway, I remember seeing the commercial and all these country stars, Reba McIntyre endorses the show, all these country, the incredible country artists wrote the score to the show, and I thought, what in the world is a show about corn doing on Broadway? Who is going to see it? What is this show about? And it is the most heartwarming, funny kind tale that the world really needs to see. What's it been like for you're in Alabama right now, I believe. What's it been like for you to take this show, which is just love and tour it around the country?

[3:42] Nick Bailey: It's been absolutely wonderful. I got to start in potato country. I joined the cast a few months ago when we were in Boise, Idaho, and they love the show in Boise. And then we went from there to Portland, Seattle, and we've been all over the West Coast, and this is our first time back on the East Coast here in Alabama. But the thing that's so amazing about the show is whether we're playing what you could consider a more rural market or a more urban market like Seattle or Phoenix, is that everybody sees the show and says, Oh, that's my family. Oh, this is actually what people are like where I come from. I know other people probably don't get this show, but this is really about us here, no matter where we are.

And so that's what I think the beauty of the show and the beauty of the writing is that it feels like an inside joke for everybody. Everybody feels included, everybody feels special, and that's one of the best things about the show is to feel like you're doing something that is specifically for the people who are seeing it right there, and it feels special to them.

[4:51] Robert Bannon: Yeah. Well, I think that it is for everybody. It really is the show that you can bring everybody to your grandma, from your grandmother to your partners to your loved ones, bring the kid, bring everybody come down and see Shucked. There's so many. I don't know how you can come up with more corn jokes. There's more jokes about corn than you will ever be able to fit in a show. I would say laugh a minute, but we have some minutes that are like four or five laughs. So we got the chuckles. Well, we talked about Robert Horn, who you know won the Tony for Tootsie and all, but Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally. Yeah, you got it. Incredible Grammy winning superstar songwriting team. What's it like to sing the score? How do you describe the score?

[5:34] Nick Bailey: This is the music that I grew up with is country music. I grew up in a family where we actually weren't allowed to listen to secular music. We only had Christian contemporary was even a little dicey for us. But of course, if you wanted to turn on the radio and be a bad boy and listen to secular music, the thing that was playing on the radio was country music. And so I grew up sneaking and hearing, you know, Garth Brooks, Faith Hill, all those 90s and 2000s country artists, and this music falls within the realm of country pop and Broadway, and it fits in those brackets so well. And the great thing about country music has always been it's where storytelling at its finest occurs. And so if they say if you sing a country song backwards, you get your dog back, you get your trailer back, you get your girlfriend back.

And I get to sing one of those classic songs in act one, it's called Somebody Will, where the guy has just found out that his best girl has kissed somebody else, and so he's called the relationship off. And he has to convince himself through the course of this song that there will be somebody else in the world who will love him. And so the song is called Somebody Will. And so it's an amazing mountain to climb every night in act one. And then you have Barn Burners that our cast member Mick Abraham gets to sing Independently Owned, which earned Alex Newell their Tony when they did the show on Broadway, and that's a song that if you can stay quiet after that song is finished, you might want to consult your doctor because you might be dead at that point.

Literally, and shout out to the incredible Mickey. She has been here before, and she sings her face off everybody. She's amazing, as did Alex. I'm I just when I think of this show, that's why I'm independently. You're not gonna be able to get that song out of your head. For you and your career, your Broadway career has been so fascinating and interesting to me because you have been in tours and on Broadway. You don't always play such you play televangelists or bad partners or bad the bad you've been the bad guy, Nick. You're bad.

[8:07] Nick Bailey: I've been the bad guy for quite a while, and so it's been a wonderful reset and change of pace to get to play the guy who, not to spoil a show, but who might at the end of the show get the girl and hasn't done anything awful to anybody?

[8:24] Robert Bannon: It's nice to not also my my poor in-laws, my mother-in-law says all the time she's like, Do you do you kill anyone in this one? Are you on drugs in this one? Do you uh do you beat up your girlfriend in this one? Like, no, no, and this one it's all good. So she's very excited, she's gonna see it in Philly. So, you know, she's she's she's she's probably the uh the person I'm looking forward to seeing the show the most to redeem myself in her eyes. For the first time. Nick Bailey is playing the good guy, everybody's time for the first time.

[8:58] Robert Bannon: So for you, isn't that your first time on the road? You you toured with Waitress. You you've done Broadway now. You've done a bunch of television credits as well. What's it like to get back on the road and tour this show? This is the first national tour of this show. You're playing all the big cities, jumping from city to city. What's it been like for you to jump back on the road?

[9:20] Nick Bailey: I've loved it. It's been absolutely fantastic. Uh with Waitress, I was in a headspace, of course, playing that character that wasn't as easy as it should have been to leave every day. And so you're just living in a very dark and kind of uh troubled headspace. And the way that this show is built and the family that exists as part of this company is just one of such laughter and fun and lighthearted joy that going to work every day seems like the biggest gift. Uh, we have a put in rehearsal this afternoon. And I I feel like if I were on a show that was maybe a little more, you know, not a bad show, but like a show that's has a bit more uh dour outlook or heavier themes like Lay Miz. I would hate to go do a put in and then have to do the show after that tonight, because like that that would be six hours of your day with people just like going through it.

But now I get to spend my entire day with a a great company that everybody on the road, when they see the show, they can see how much we love each other on stage. And so it's like going to see your family when you go see the show. You're like, oh, that's that's my uncle so and so, or that's my my brother so and so. And uh, yeah, so doing this show has been a real gift because I yeah, it's just it's been it's been wonderful to sing these songs, be welcomed by this company of people because many of them have been out on the road since uh 2024, fall of 2024, and many of them stayed with the company, and then those that went off and pursued up with other opportunities. We came in as replacements, and sometimes there's a lot of friction between the new cast and the old cast, but this company has been so welcoming with open arms, and so it just feels like like the the best gift possible to do this show.

[11:20] Robert Bannon: I can't think of it shucks. People listen here in Detroit in the Midwest, even though Detroit's a big giant city, Nick, it's a Midwest outside of the city of Detroit, farms, horses, far like it is a it is a Midwestern place.

[11:34] Nick Bailey: Yeah, baby, yeah.

[11:36] Robert Bannon: I am not from the Midwest, I am from Fort Lee, New Jersey, one mile from the George Washington Bridge. And I've had to learn a lot about Midwestern life.

[11:44] Nick Bailey: Okay.

[11:44] Robert Bannon: And and I have to say that I can't think of a better place for this show to be than everybody in the Detroit metro area to come down with your family when they're visiting in the snow, and they don't Nick, they don't care about the snow and ice here. They drive. Oh, there's 10 feet of snow, it's fine. I gotta go to the grocery store. Okay, I don't come from that world, Nick. But so no matter what the weather's like, no matter how cold it is, negative 10, they're showing up at the Fisher Theater to see you. So be ready, bring a jacket.

[12:13] Nick Bailey: Excited, we are so excited. Um, while we're here talking about it, you can get your tickets at BroadwayandDetroit.com, you can get them their tickets available, and the show is running from the 23rd until the fourth. So if you don't have plans for the holiday, or if you if you have plans for the holiday, invite Nick to your house because he'll be not home. And so we we have all these plans through New Year's. So while your kids are home from school, while your jobs are closed, Broadwayandgetroit.com is the place to see. And it's such a great family show because it's not there are blue jokes in the show for sure, but they fly over the heads of the kids because they are not explicit. And so the the parents and the aunts and uncles that come see the show, they feel like they are seeing something that is racy, and the kids that come to see the show feel like they are seeing something that is sophisticated, adult, grown up, but they have no idea why some of these lines are getting laughs.

And so it's up to the parents to just describe to them why some things are funny or not. But it's a family show. No one's gonna walk away from this being like, Mom, should I have seen that? And be like, no, baby, you're fine, you're fine. And it's got a great moral uh to it. You know, we're living in a in a show about a hero and a con man and the small town of America and the battle for what's right and what's wrong. It sounds relevant, it is as relevant as ever. It is something that we all need to be talking about, about you know, protecting one another, neighborhoods, communities, and and making sure that we all like to have each other's back.

[13:38] Nick Bailey: Um, I think that's an important lesson for everybody, no matter where you live. Yeah, one of the final lines of the show that Robert wrote, which is so special, I'm so honored to get to say it every night, is we need to focus on the things that we share and not the things we don't. And the great thing about this show is when you're sitting in the audience, everybody is having the best time, everybody is laughing. You look to your left, to your right, you have no idea what these people's backgrounds or what their opinions on certain things are, but you do remember that we all share something, and that's humanity, and that is love for each other. And that is uh there's there's a great song in Act Two called uh Best Friends.

You're my best well, I don't even know what the name of the song is. I don't sing it. But the the lyric is is talking about how um about how you you can't choose your family, but you can choose your friends, and never mind. Cut that part out. I don't know what I'm saying. What I'm trying to say is this show brings people together, and I'm so proud to be part of something that does that.

[14:47] Robert Bannon: Look, I'm telling you, uh A plus across the board, recommended saw it on Broadway. Can't wait to see you all come into my new my new city. Go get your tickets, shucktmusical.com, Broadwayandroit.com for your tickets for the Detroit run of the show. Nick, I will I'm gonna be here. So look, if you need to borrow a scarf or a hat or a jacket, a coat, I got you.

[15:07] Nick Bailey: Bank they don't.

[15:09] Robert Bannon: I used to look like Nick. I used to be skinny and in shape like Nick. Then I moved here. Then I ate Coney Dogs and Chili Cheese fries. They don't like vegetables here. Right now, listen great. What are you talking about? Cheese curd.

[15:22] Nick Bailey: Yes, please.

[15:23] Robert Bannon: Nick, I'm covering it up with this gigantic parka. It looks like I have a cheeseburger deluxe in my stomach right now, Nick. So if you need to borrow an orange or a grape or a piece of kale, I've got some for you. They don't like it in Detroit.

[15:39] Nick Bailey: I don't they like to fry everything's very fried.

[15:41] Robert Bannon: As well they should.

[15:44] Nick Bailey: Okay, then I'll bring you a coney dog and some chili cheese fries.

[15:47] Robert Bannon: Yes, please. Yes, please, and thank you. I'll see you over at the Fisher Theater. Congratulations on this epic run. Congratulations on the part and bringing some joy across the country. Everybody, follow Nick, the link will be below to follow him on Instagram so you can stay up to date with him on the road. And then go to Broadwayandetroit.com, get tickets for this in their whole entire season, bringing art and culture in Broadway to you here in the city. I'm so excited to see you all. Thank you. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year.

[16:09] Nick Bailey: Thanks, Robert. I hope you have a great rest of your day.

[16:12] Robert Bannon: You too.