Dead Outlaw
Elmer McCurdy wanted to be somebody. Born out of wedlock to a teenage mother in late-19th-century Maine, he grew up dreaming of infamy. ('I'm the outlaw Jesse James! Bang bang—!') He got drunk, got in fights, moved out west; he joined a gang of Oklahoma train robbers, and he died in a shootout at the age 31. But that's not where his story ended. McCurdy's corpse got embalmed and wound up traveling the country as a ghoulish sideshow attraction. ('There's something 'bout a mummy that everybody needs.') It changed hands for decades before winding up in a California amusement-park ride, painted DayGlo red and hanging naked from a noose. In 1976, a crewman on TV's The Six Million Dollar Man ripped an arm from it and only then discovered that this prop was once a man. Exactly which man it had been was by that point a mystery; by then it was just some body.
The weirder-than-fiction true story of McCurdy's preservation and degradation is the subject of Dead Outlaw, a rowdy and darkly hilarious picaresque musical by the team behind 2016's bittersweet The Band's Visit: book writer Itamar Moses, songwriter David Yazbek (joined here by Erik Della Penna) and director David Cromer. These two shows couldn't seem more different at first pass, but they share a deep curiosity and wry humanity; they embrace the complex and the unknown. 'No one knows if it was cuz of that he started getting into trouble,' Dead Outlaw 's Bandleader (a perfectly gruff and rascally Jeb Brown) says of McCurdy's traumatic childhood. 'Maybe he was just wired that way. Or maybe there was no reason at all.'
Dead Outlaw | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
About one thing, though, this musical is certain: Everybody dies, no matter how famous. 'Abe Lincoln's dead / Frank James is dead,' the Bandleader sings in 'Dead,' the hard-driving rockabilly number that opens and closes the show. 'Your mama's dead / And so are you.' The song's net widens to include figures ranging from Gandhi to Zendaya. Some of those named are still alive (for now) but the implication is clear: It doesn't make much difference either way. McCurdy is killed halfway through the musical, but the actor who plays him, Andrew Durand, stays onstage for the remainder of the show, lying motionless on a table or propped up in a coffin. In every stage tableau that ensues, he serves as the memento mori.
The flip side of Dead Outlaw 's hate-to-tell-ya candor about mortality is a gimlet-eyed skepticism about the greed for attention built into American culture. The acerbic comic essayist Cintra Wilson has described celebrity as 'a grotesque, crippling disease'; Dead Outlaw extends that to fatality and beyond. The secret to McCurdy's resistance to decay is that his embalming fluid contains arsenic. Fame is laced with poison.
Dead Outlaw | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
In a sense, the show is like an anti- Pippin, with the Bandleader as the Leading Player: the devil on the lost boy's shoulder, goading him to self-immolation in the name of glory. In the guise of a bandit named Walter Jarrett, he's the one who recruits McCurdy into his gang when the two share a jail cell. ('You can decide,' 'Decide what?' 'Whether you wanna be remembered.') And McCurdy, who is scared of a life where 'nobody knows your name'—'If I never signify, am I really here?' he sings—can't resist. He meets a pretty girl, Maggie (the excellent Julia Knitel), in small-town Kansas, and has the option of remaking himself into a decent type of fellow: 'An honest man / That you can trust / Like normal people / Who soon return to dust.' He chooses a different road.
If the thoroughly original Dead Outlaw has a resemblance to any other musicals at all, it is perhaps to the work of the late Michael Friedman, who also favored documentary material and playful pastiche Americana, and whose Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson had comparable notes of redneck boisterousness. (Moses and Friedman collaborated on 2014's The Fortress of Solitude.) But McCurdy is a more poignant figure than Jackson was. As a would-be safecracker, he's a total screw-up, a rotten yegg: He's bad at being a bad guy. When he grabs the microphone to scream out the furious 'Killed a Man in Maine,' he's just a pathetic drunk; his attempted braggadocio falls flat on its face.
Dead Outlaw | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
Durand's performance is bisected by McCurty's demise. For the first half of Dead Outlaw, he is a highly active figure, sometimes wistful—he has a beautiful high tenor—but lit by an inner fury; he would fit right in with the violent losers of Assassins or January 6. But then: Bang bang—! His mortal thread is cut, and Durand spends the rest of the show being moved around inertly in what might be the most impressive deadpan performance in history. He's staggeringly still: You can't even catch him blink.
That same level of commitment extends to all of Dead Outlaw. The writing is piquant and sly, the songs have verve and resonance, and every element of Cromer's production seems to fit exactly in place. The show premiered last year as part of Audible Theater's Off Broadway programming, which is apt. The whole project has the spirit of a serial podcast, branching off whenever it likes to explore some fascinating tangent with help from Cromer's protean supporting players: Knitel, Eddie Cooper, Dashiell Eaves, Ken Marks, Trent Saunders and crowd favorite Thom Sesma (as a Tinseltown coroner turned crooner). These very fine performers, along with Brown and the onstage band, revolve around Durand's extremely stable center. The 2024–25 season has been strangely full of cadavers; things to do on Broadway when you're dead this year include faking out Nazis in Operation Mincemeat, narrating yourself in Sunset Blvd., getting a makeover in Death Becomes Her and feeding your friends in Swept Away. But Durand takes rigor mortis to new levels of morbid rigor. He's the hardest-working stiff on Broadway.
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