1 week Ago By Greg Evans
The indignities of the grave pale in comparison to the indignities of having your preserved corpse put on display as a sideshow attraction, wax museum exhibit, or amusement park horror ride prop. You could ask Elmer McCurdy all about that if he wasn’t, as one of the best songs in Dead Outlaw , an unmissable musical filled with excellent tunes, puts succinctly, dead. Had Elmer stayed dead in one last place a bit longer he might have added an appearance on The Six Million Dollar Man to his show biz resume.
In one of the quirkiest, most morbid and somehow loveliest musicals to hit Broadway this season – even Floyd Collins ‘ dying spelunker plot seems conventional by comparison – Dead Outlaw, directed by David Cromer (whose work here surpasses his accomplishments on Good Night, And Good Luck ), is a very late entry in Broadway’s 2024-2025 season, and absolutely one of the best. Related Stories 'Just In Time' Broadway Review: Jonathan Groff Plays Bobby Darin - And Two Stars Ignite 'Death Becomes Her' Broadway Musical Leads Outer Critics Circle Award Nominees - Complete List With music and lyrics by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna and a book by Itamar Moses – Yazbek and Moses previously gave us the splendid The Band’s Visit – Dead Outlaw , acclaimed and award winning in previous stagings, tells the too strange-to-be-fiction tale of a real-life hapless, third-rate train robber of the late 19th/early 20th centuries who wasted a young life on booze, violence, failed love and unsuccessful crimes before being gut-shot at the age of 31. And then the real story began.
Watch on Deadline As an arsenic preserved corpse, ol’ Elmer got around and got famous in a way he never did in life. At first just a special attraction at the funeral home where no one came to claim him, Elmer, in a standing wooden coffin with a shotgun in his hands, his criminal history exaggerated as if he was a long lost brother of Jesse James, soon is sold off or traded or just passed along from one freak show venue to another, sometimes mistaken for a mannequin and finally consigned in the 1970s to a janitor’s room at a fading Long Beach amusement park (his last “role” was that of a hanging man in one of the park’s spooky rides). That changed in 1976, when a prop scout from TV’s The Six Million Dollar Man visited the old amusement park looking for useable items.
When the mannequin’s arm came off in the scout’s hands – bones protruding – ol’ Elmer became a nationwide mystery. Who was he? How did he get here? Dead Outlaw provides the answers. We first meet Elmer, very much alive (and played by Andrew Durand of Shucked in a fascinating performance that should certainly be in contention this Tony season), when he is lying somewhere outdoors at night singing an incredibly pretty and bittersweet ballad about the stars and the warm wind and the dew and staking his claim on all of it by noting “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.
” A train whistle sounds in the distance, but Elmer isn’t entranced by its high-lonesome yearning – he jumps up and out of his reverie and yells to his comrades that it’s time to rob “this f*cking train!” The moment is just the first example of the shifts in musical moods that Dead Outlaw will make, with one as pleasing as the other. Early on, Elmer breaks free of his plotbound character to join the band in a musical performance that would do any hardcore outfit proud. Those rowdy numbers – the raucous, rockabilly honky-tonk band ever present on stage gives Dead Outlaw a country-punk score to go with its country-punk attitude – alternate with heartfelt and heartbreaking ballads.
In one titled “Normal” Elmer, sweetly dancing with a new romance, ponders the joys of settling down with a good woman he loves, or loves at as best he can, and living a life like normal folks. Another song, the rousing rocker “Dead” is even performed twice, its lyrics seeming to remind us that we all have loads in common with Elmer – his fate, minus the posthumous travel, is ours. In a twangy, high-speed rockabilly punk style, the band tells Elmer and us that all the plots and schemes and dreams come to only one end, which the chorus of the song is only too happy to spell out: “Your mama’s dead/your daddy’s dead/your brother’s dead/and so are you/Abe Lincoln’s dead/Frank James is dead/your mama’s dead and so are you.
” The reprise adds a more updated roster of the unalive: John Gotti, Dillinger, Balzac, Tupac and Anne Frank. “Dead” – performed by the onstage rockabilly band led by actor Jeb Brown, who also takes part in the play proper – has the feel of a great barroom rouser infused with the caustic irreverence of punk singer Jim Carroll’s 1980 anthem “People Who Died.” Another song that, like “Dead” and “Normal” combines the macabre with something close to genuine sentiment, is a late-in-the-show comic number sung in the style of a swinging Sinatra crooner by none other than L.
A.’s famous coroner Thomas Noguchi (Thom Sesma). As he performs the 1975 autopsy (Elmer, at this late stage, is portrayed by a grotesque pink puppet), Noguchi, singing into the microphone meant to record his notes, performs “Up To The Stars,” pledging to do his best for this mummified corpse and perhaps even return some of its long-forgotten identity.
But the song’s jazzy “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” style prepares us for what also comes out of Noguchi’s mouth – gossipy tidbits about the autopsies of Marilyn Monroe, Sharon Tate and Natalie Wood. “Oh Natalie Wood!/Oh Natalie won’t!/leave a legend/when she left that boat/Who, when and why/did this person die?/Go fish the ocean/where the answers float.” Another standalone song is performed by a character only tangentially connected to Elmer: In 1928, to promote the completion of the cross-country Route 66, civic organizers sponsored a footrace that took runners from one coast to the other.
To keep tourists interested in the very long event, various sideshows followed the path as well, including one that featured a particular you-know-who mummy. Andy Payne, a member of the Cherokee nation, won the race and a $25,000 prize, as recounted in a poignant ballad sung by Trent Saunders, the actor playing Payne. After he sings that he didn’t want to take up offers to live the kind of freak show celebrity existence bestowed on Elmer, he tells us that he returned home and lived a long, good life, and died surrounded by family.
But as he steps away from the mic, he pauses, turns back and reminds that, anyway, he still died. No one, this show never fails to remind, gets out of here alive. Arnulfo Maldonado’s honky tonk performance space is perfectly cluttered with musical instruments, an old map tacked to the wall, and what looks to be decades of barroom detritus scattered about.
Occasionally a table will be brought out to suggest another bar, another time, for Elmer to get drunk in and pick a fight, or a safe will be wheeled on stage for the clueless Elmer to try to blow up. When he’s shot and killed, no one will claim his body. The cast of Dead Outlaw couldn’t be better, with Jeb Brown a fine band leader and singer guiding us along the story (and occasionally jumping off the band riser to join Elmer in various misadventures).
Julia Knitel as the various loving if dejected women in Elmer’s life (and death) gives the show real heart, not least when she portrays an adolescent girl whose dad is one of the mid-century freak show exhibitors who stores Elmer’s coffined corpse in his home. Knitel, as the lonely daughter Millicent, actually forges a spiritual bond with this poor lost soul, and the beautiful ballad she sings pulls off a miracle by rendering that bond as genuine, not creepy. As good as all the players in Dead Outlaw are, the show belongs to Durand, who has kicked around Broadway for some 20 years in shows from Spring Awakening and the Go Gos jukeboxer Head Over Heels to the 2023 crowd-pleaser Shucked .
He’s raised the level of every show he’s been in, but at last comes into his own in Dead Outlaw . It’s a delightful, angry, sometimes even sublime performance, not least when he is required to remain corpse-still through much of the latter half, moving only when jostled or as the years begin to distort him in various ways. When the actor is given a chance to sing once again, the opportunity is cut comically short by the the stitching-closed of his mouth.
But most impressive is what Durand and the entire production achieve in insisting on dignity for even the briefest and most unremarkable of lives. As absurd as true life, as macabre as a freak show, as blunt as a bullet to the gut, Dead Outlaw also manages to afford Elmer McCurdy something better than dignity, it offers remembrance. Yes, he’s dead.
But so’s your mama, and so’s Abe Lincoln, and so’s Balzac, and so’s Anne Frank, and, inevitably, so are you. Say the names. Title: Dead Outlaw Venue: Broadway’s Longacre Theatre Director: David Cromer Book: Itamar Moses Music & Lyrics: David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna Cast: Andrew Durand, Jeb Brown, Eddie Cooper, Dashiell Eaves, Julia Knitel, Ken Marks, Trent Saunders, Thom Sesma Running time: 1 hr 40 min (no intermission).
