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USA Today
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
‘Dead Outlaw' review: Transcendent mummy musical brings bizarre true story to life
'Dead Outlaw' review: Transcendent mummy musical brings bizarre true story to life NEW YORK — Who needs a defibrillator when you have 'Dead Outlaw?' David Yazbek's latest curio, which opened April 27 at the Longacre Theatre, is a waggish, walloping, what-in-tarnation musical; the sort of coup that is so sublimely strange and strangely profound, it will revive your faith in Broadway itself. That's a whole lot of words for a show where the lead character spends half the 100-minute runtime with his mouth pursed shut in a casket. But that's also part of its genius. 'Dead Outlaw' is based on the unbelievable true story of Elmer McCurdy (Andrew Durand), a haplessly inept train robber who was born in 1880, died in 1911, and buried in 1977. After he was gunned down by police, McCurdy's body laid unclaimed in an Oklahoma funeral home for months. Embalmed with liberal amounts of arsenic, he was eventually propped up and put on public display, with looky-loos paying two bits to gawk at the so-called 'bandit who wouldn't give up.' But McCurdy's story didn't end there. For decades, his mummified corpse was passed around and sold into traveling carnivals, wax museums and exploitation movies, ultimately landing at an amusement park in Long Beach, California, where McCurdy's body was painted flaming red and strung up in a haunted house. The macabre details of how his remains were discovered and identified are all revealed at the top of the show, which traces his wild, woebegone journey from Jesse James wannabe to neglected carrion. 'Dead Outlaw' is ingeniously directed by David Cromer, whose production is arrestingly lit by Heather Gilbert, with kooky, homespun scenic design from Arnulfo Maldonado. The narrative unspools like a spellbinding campfire tale, as a six-piece band – led by the gruff yet inviting Jeb Brown – unleash a maelstrom of mandolin- and banjo-laden earworms, from McCurdy's snarling barnstormer 'Killed a Man in Maine,' to the sultry stick-'em-up 'Indian Train.' The electrifying score, written by Yazbek and Erik Della Penna, is pure, undistilled Americana, but with the scorching rock edge of 'Passing Strange' and the mordant, satiric delights of 'Little Shop of Horrors.' In 'Up to the Stars,' a coroner (Thom Sesma) croons Dean Martin-style atop his autopsy table, musing how even the most sensational deaths all come down to forensic pathology in the end. And in the sweet-and-sour 'Millicent's Song,' a teenage misfit (the phenomenal Julia Knitel) divulges her youthful fears and yearnings to the lifeless McCurdy, who's been stashed in her living room by her filmmaker dad. As the girl prepares to leave home, she confesses her unwonted envy for the felonious crowbait: 'You get to stay the same / and I wish that I could, too / growing up ain't as easy as it seems.' Durand delivers the most indelible performance of the season as McCurdy: motionless, flat-eyed and unblinking as he stands upright in a wooden coffin for much of the show, reduced to a rifle-toting rag doll. It's a mind-blowing physical feat, to be clear, but he also imbues the tetchy character with a potent, devastating undercurrent. As imagined by playwright Itamar Moses in his incisive yet humane book, McCurdy was someone who longed to make some sort of mark on the world, but he had neither the good fortune nor the skills to achieve much of anything. The harsh reality is, most of us aren't destined to be revered or remembered, and it's impossible not to take pity on our perished desperado as he's continually chewed up and discarded as a trifling sideshow oddity. When the clock finally runs out, all we really hope for and deserve is some peace. That futility, and tragedy, is poignantly rendered in Durand's stiff, cold hands. In the staggering 'Dead Outlaw,' death is both commodified and desensitized; a cruel fact of life that we are pummeled with repeatedly throughout the musical. ('Your friends are dead / your dog is dead / and so are you,' Brown growls in the cheeky, name-dropping finale.) But in facing our bleak mortal coil with a laugh and a song, McCurdy's hair-raising, pulse-racing resuscitation helps us all feel a little more alive. 'Dead Outlaw' is now playing at the Longacre Theatre (220 W. 48th Street).
New York Post
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
‘Dead Outlaw' review: Wild corpse musical is too tame on Broadway
Theater review DEAD OUTLAW One hour and 40 minutes, with no intermission. At the Longacre Theatre, 220 West 48th Street. There's a nagging similarity between the 20th-century criminal Elmer McCurdy and 'Dead Outlaw,' the eccentric musical about him. McCurdy was killed in a shoot-out with police after a bungled train robbery in 1911. And then, in a stomach-churning turn of events, his mummified corpse was carted around the country for decades as an attraction in unsavory traveling tourist museums. Advertisement 'Dead Outlaw,' which opened Sunday at the Longacre Theatre, has also been schlepped a distance — from the cool and intimate Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village to a big Broadway house uptown. It, too, has become a bit stiff in the process. I quite enjoyed the scrappy first incarnation last year, and still admire the score by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna that stitches together rockabilly, campfire songs, lounge music and folk into an eerie Americana soundscape that's punchy and unsettling. Advertisement And the clever conceit of the show from writer Itamar Moses — that McCurdy is a mostly silent cadaver for half the runtime — is smart and sad; a stinging comment on the grotesque lengths some (many, really) will go to make a buck. But in the Broadway version of 'Dead Outlaw,' directed by David Cromer, there is a lot of dead air. 4 'Dead Outlaw,' which opened on Broadway, tells the story of a bandit who became a famous corpse. Matthew Murphy Well, except in the glass-shattering opener, a rascally screamer called 'Dead' that's blared by an onstage band in a shoebox that looks like a college dropout's garage. The playfully rude lyrics rattle off people who are no longer alive (the joke is that many of them actually are) and concludes with 'and so are you!' Think of the unifying cry as 'Ich bin ein Elmer!' Advertisement The group's frontman is actor Jeb Brown, perfectly cast with a husky radio voice, who becomes the narrator — Mr. Rogers after midnight. At first the effect is like listening to a weird-but-true podcast before bed. Soon, though, the 'and then this happened's become — forgive me — overkill. Elmer, both when pathetically alive and famously deceased, is played by Andrew Durand, an easy-to-like actor who audiences will remember as the romantic lead from 'Shucked' and 'Head Over Heels.' As his resume of curiosities would suggest, he's Broadway's go-to guy for 'odd.' 4 Elmer McCurdy's body toured the country for years after he died. Matthew Murphy Durand is adorably awkward as Elmer tries and tries and fails and fails to make it as even a D-List bandit. Advertisement A violent drunk who hops from town to town, adopting new identities along the way, Durand's Elmer softly croons a lovely Ben Folds-y tune called 'Normal' and hollers a feverish one called 'I Killed A Man in Maine.' In the rambunctious latter, he hurls objects across the stage and attempts to knock down Arnulfo Maldonado's set. In the second half, with sunken eyes and a razor-sharp jaw line — and I mean this as a compliment — he plays dead very well. The guy rarely ever blinks. 4 Julia Knitel (left) plays a variety of roles in 'Dead Outlaw,' but most movingly a little girl named Millicent. Matthew Murphy The show becomes more intriguing as the story grows wilder. Its most involving and moving number, in more ways than one, is called 'Millicent's Song' and is sung by a little girl whose dad has acquired Elmer's body and is storing it at their house. At first she's rightly horrified by the sight, but soon starts sweetly confiding to the dead man like a therapist. Time passes as she grows up, funny evolves into poignant, and her conversations with the unchanging Elmer mature. Julia Knitel sings sublimely, and the song creatively ticks down the years, rather than having the narrator announce when and where we are. Again. 4 'Dead Outlaw' gets more intriguing as the story grows weirder. Matthew Murphy There's also a memorable cruise-ship ditty called 'Up to the Stars,' smoothly performed by Thom Sesma as the coroner as if he's Michael Buble is another dark delight. It's something out of 'Six Feet Under.' You'll either be tickled by the coroner's punchlines ('Natalie Wood? Natalie Won't') or horrified and offended. Advertisement The musical has many diamonds in the rough. They're just not polished properly by Cromer's staging, which is awfully haphazard and diffuse for a typically sure-thing director. Scenes far off to the side feel quickly cobbled together, even though the show premiered more than a year ago. 'Outlaw' reminds me of the rebel rock musical 'Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson' crossed with a bone-dry Coen Brothers film. There's room for something so subversive on Broadway. But not when the production's energy level is that of a funeral parlor at 8 a.m.
Los Angeles Times
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘Dead Outlaw,' a musical about a famous corpse discovered in Long Beach, makes its way to Broadway
NEW YORK — 'Dead Outlaw,' the offbeat musical from the team behind the Tony-winning musical 'The Band's Visit,' isn't mincing words with the title. The show, which had its official opening Sunday at Broadway's Longacre Theatre, tells the story of the unsuccessful career of a real-life bandit, who achieved more fame as a corpse than as a man. Born in 1880, Elmer McCurdy, a crook whose ambition exceeded his criminal skill, died in a shoot-out with the police after another botched train robbery in 1911. But his story didn't end there. His preserved body had an eventful afterlife all its own. 'Dead Outlaw,' a critics' darling when it premiered last year at Audible's Minetta Lane Theatre, may be the only musical to make the disposition of a body an occasion for singing and dancing. David Yazbek, who conceived the idea of turning this stranger-than-fiction tale into a musical, wrote the score with Erik Della Penna. Itamar Moses, no stranger to unlikely dramatic subjects, compressed the epic saga into a compact yet labyrinthine book. Director David Cromer, whose sensibility gravitates between stark and dark, endows the staging with macabre elegance. Yet Yazbek, Moses and Cromer aren't repeating themselves. If anything, they've set themselves a steeper challenge. 'Dead Outlaw' is more unyielding as a musical subject than 'The Band's Visit,' which is to say it's less emotionally accessible. It's not easy to make a musical about a crook with a volatile temper, an unslakable thirst for booze and a record of fumbled heists. It's even harder to make one out of a dead body that went on exhibition at traveling carnivals and freak shows before ending up on display in a Long Beach fun house, where the mummified remains were accidentally discovered by a prop man while working on an episode of 'The Six Million Dollar Man' in 1976. Stephen Sondheim might have enjoyed the challenge of creating a musical from such an outlandish premise. 'Dead Outlaw' evokes at moments the droll perversity of 'Sweeney Todd,' the cold-hearted glee of 'Assassins' and the Brechtian skewering of 'Road Show' — Sondheim musicals that fly in the face of conventional musical theater wisdom. As tight as a well thought-out jam-session,'Dead Outlaw' also recalls 'Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,' the Michael Friedman-Alex Timbers musical that created a satiric historical rock show around a most problematic president. And the show's unabashed quirkiness had my theater companion drawing comparisons with 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch.' Andrew Durand, who plays Elmer, has just the right bad-boy frontman vibe. The hard-driving presence of bandleader and narrator Jeb Brown suffuses the production with Americana authenticity, vibrantly maintained by music director Rebekah Bruce and music supervisor Dean Sharenow. Elmer moves through the world like an open razor, as the title character of Georg Büchner's 'Woyzeck' is aptly described in that play. A précis of Elmer's early life in Maine is run through by members of the eight-person cast in the bouncy, no-nonsense manner of a graphic novel. The character's criminal path is tracked with similar briskness — a fateful series of colorful encounters and escapades as Elmer, a turbulent young man on the move, looks for his big opportunity in Kansas and Oklahoma. Destined for trouble, he finds it unfailingly wherever he goes. Elmer routinely overestimates himself. Having acquired some training with nitroglycerin in the Army, he wrongly convinces himself that he has the know-how to effectively blow up a safe. He's like a broke gambler who believes his next risky bet will bring him that long-awaited jackpot. One advantage of dying young is that he never has to confront his abject ineptitude. Arnulfo Maldonado's scenic design turns the production into a fun-house exhibit. The band is prominently arrayed on the box-like set, pounding out country-rock numbers that know a thing or two about hard living. The music can sneak up on you, especially when a character gives voice to feelings that they can't quite get a handle on. Durand can't communicate emotions that Elmer doesn't possess, but he's able to sharply convey the disquiet rumbling through the character's short life. There's a gruff lyricism to the performance that's entrancing even when Elmer is standing up in a coffin. But I wish there were more intriguing depth to the character. Elmer is a historical curiosity, to be sure. And he reveals something about the American moneymaking ethos, which holds not even a dead body sacred. But as a man he's flat and a bit of a bore. And the creators are perhaps too enthralled by the oddity of his tale. The show is an eccentric wallow through the morgue of history. It's exhilarating stylistically, less so as a critique of the dark side of the American dream. Julia Knitel has a voice that breaks up the monochromatic maleness of the score. As Maggie, Elmer's love interest for a brief moment, she returns later in the show to reflect on the stranger with the 'broken disposition' who left her life with the same defiant mystery that he entered it. I wish Knitel had more opportunity to interweave Maggie's ruminations. The unassuming beauty of her singing adds much needed tonal variety. The musical takes an amusing leap into Vegas parody when coroner Thomas Noguchi (an electric Thom Sesma) is allowed to strut his medical examiner stuff. Ani Taj's choreography, like every element of the production, makes the most of its minimalist means. Wanderingly weird, 'Dead Outlaw' retains its off-Broadway cred at the Longacre. It's a small show that creeps up on you, like a bizarre dream that's hard to shake.
