Broadway, that row of big boxes that make your favorite movies and TV shows even louder, may soon be home to a musical revival of Hee Haw, according to a gushing report by New York Post columnist and self-proclaimed “world’s biggest Hee Haw fan” Michael Riedel. Last month, Reidel says, several producers attended a reading of a script by Robert Horn that pays tribute to the classic TV show, which captured with unflinching realism the everyday lives of people in the rural heartland—lives they spent standing around in cornfields trading pun-filled punchlines and listening to Conway Twitty, all to take their minds off the collapse of American agriculture.
While the musical will have Kornfield Kounty kharacters like Grandpa Jones, Misty Rowe, Lulu Roman, and Junior Samples all popping up—literally—it won’t be a typical Hee Haw revue, but rather a quasi-linear story of a “wily sexpot” who aims to see the world before she marries her boyfriend. Presumably that “wily sexpot” will wear one of those gingham shirts knotted just under her ample breasts, a feature that accounts for at least 40 percent of Hee Haw’s fan base.
For those unfamiliar with Hee Haw, our own Noel Murray wrote an appreciation a couple years back. There’s also this Yahoo! Answer to “What is a good joke from the old television show Hee Haw?”: “A good joke from the old television show Hee Haw is when they fed hay to the grandfather. This was a hilarious joke, which is still talked about today.” Indeed, and now that joke will have its own Broadway musical.