Dead Outlaw drives the final nail into the 2024-25 Broadway season, and I’ve never felt more alive. Elmer McCurdy’s funeral is the party of the year: wall-to-wall country and rock bangers, a dynamite cast, and a story too weird to be true. Elmer’s tale is uniquely American, a bizarre chronicle of greed, crime, and bad taste. You see, the Maine-born McCurdy rode the rails West to try his hand at train-robbing in Oklahoma, only to get himself shot in a hayloft by a posse at age 30. His embalmed corpse, tipped upright with a rifle in his rigor-mortised hands, became a macabre tourist attraction for decades, carted through various states, passed down to owners under his identity had rotted away. When a location scout for The Six Million Dollar Man discovered the desecrated corpse—naked, painted devil-red, and hanging in an abandoned amusement ride in California in 1976—Elmer’s journey to selfhood and dignity began.
So goes the (unsentimental) emotional arc of Dead Outlaw, which has an irreverent yet wistful book by Itamar Moses and rootsy earworms by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna. This is a darkly exhilarating musical about life’s wonder, and how hard it can be to find meaning in that wonder. In an early scene, Elmer (Andrew Durand) rests with his fellow bandits one night by train tracks, gazing at the stars. “The sky is black but filled with diamonds,” Durand serenades the heavens, extending his arm. “You can almost hold them in your hands / And up there God is preaching / Laughing while you’re reaching.” Best to savor this fleeting hopefulness of Elmer, whose childhood was marred by parental neglect and his adulthood by booze and rage that drives away a potential love interest (Julia Knitel). Soon after Elmer’s starry idyll, a guitar-strumming Bandleader (Jeb Brown) rips into a rockabilly list song to remind us that our days are numbered: “Between the dark and the dark is / The voice you’re always hear’n / Some crazy auctioneer is always yelling at you. / And you walk, you run, you flee the dark and see the sun / And every brick you ever laid will crumble away.” Gothic gallows humor set to a locomotive beat, “Dead” scythes through a litany of the deceased regardless of time (Balzac, check; Ken Burns, not yet).
As conceived by Yazbek (The Full Monty, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), Dead Outlaw often plays like an ingenious concept album, sharing sketches of the antihero’s early days, before breaking into a series of gruesome anecdotes after Elmer’s been pumped full of arsenic to freeze his tissues. Although the musical idioms range anachronistically from bluegrass, ’80s rock anthem, and Las Vegas jazz (the impish Thom Sesma plays a prim pathologist who cuts loose like Bobby Darin), the recurring mode is murder ballad, Appalachian odes to killers and other villains. In musical theater, the most obvious example of the dramatic murder ballad is Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and, more explicitly, Assassins. (Brecht and Weill’s Mackie Messer famously had a stab at it.) Difference here is, the criminal fails and it’s not clear if he ever killed anyone. It’s time and society that commit offenses against nature.
Catchy and crammed with memorable hooks and lyrics that are clever as well as touching, Yazbek and Della Penna have written what is easily the best new score on Broadway since, well, Yazbek’s masterful score for The Band’s Visit (which also had a superb book by Moses). Bearing influences from Frank Loesser to Britpop band XTC, Yazbek has for 25 years remained one of my favorite composer-lyricists. He’s got a witty, skeptical way with melody and lyrics that always reminds you of his roots as a singer-songwriter (Dead Outlaw’s quirky black comedy sent my mind back to the 1996 album The Laughing Man). Along with Jeanine Tesori and Dave Malloy, Yazbek is an artist who sustains hope for the American musical.
After last year’s sold-out run at the Minetta Lane Theatre (produced by Audible, now joined uptown by Sonia Friedman Productions), David Cromer’s lean and stylish production has transferred handsomely to the Longacre. Cromer is a genius at achieving great emotional and narrative force with economy and restraint (also evident in his staging of Good Night, and Good Luck), and he has a splendid cast to work with. There’s the aforementioned Durand, as splendid rocking out in the punk wailer, “Killed a Man in Maine,” as he is being eerily still in a coffin. Willowy and radiant Julia Knitel is a charming newcomer and versatile comedian. Big-voiced Eddie Cooper handles various seedy and sinister roles, notably as a greedy mortician. Possessed of gentler pipes but a dryly hilarious character man, Dashiell Eaves plays a handful of schnooks and crooks. Trent Saunders gets a whole number, “Andy Payne,” in which he has to run a marathon and warble his heart out. Ken Marks takes on several paternal and authority figures with wry zest. Sesma, as noted, is quite moving as the pathologist who demands proper burial for Elmer’s remains. And finally, Jeb Brown is our whiskey-soaked narrator, a down-home raconteur who keeps the fun flowing, no matter how dark it gets.
Brown spends a fair amount of time inside a moveable unit set designed by Anulfo Maldonado, which resembles the stage of a small-town roadhouse floating in an inky void. Around this rock-band island, Cromer creates a procession of striking, penumbral tableaux, his actors lit by Heather Gilbert and costumed across the decades by the outstanding Sarah Laux. Since the piece was originally created to be recorded and distributed on audio by Audible, everything you need to know is in the book and songs, but it’s still a visually engaging treat. My vote for best new musical this season, Dead Outlaw doesn’t preach to any choir or pander to tourists, it’s not based on corporate IP and doesn’t need a star to sell tickets. By the crass expectations of Broadway, that should mean dead on arrival, but I dearly wish this show maximum longevity.
Dead Outlaw | 1hr 40mins. No intermission. | Longacre Theatre | 220 West 48th Street | 212-239-6200 | Buy Tickets Here
