"DEAD OUTLAW:" Whoopee! We're All Gonna Die
Dead Outlaw is the second best musical about a dead body in Broadway history. The first best is Operation Mincemeat, which also happens to be my favorite musical of this Broadway season, and merits the Best Musical Tony Award, I feel, but …well…you know. We’ll see.
The third best musical about a dead body, ever (if you’re curious), is Lucky Stiff, an early work (1988) by Ahrens and Flaherty that never made it past Playwrights Horizons but still could turn up on Broadway (stranger things have happened, and no doubt will).
The third best musical about a dead body this season (two dead bodies, in fact) is Death Becomes Her, which I’ve already written about HERE and I still stand by every word.
This brings us up to date on the history of musical theater’s necrophilic sweepstakes.
Now, with Tony time ticking down:
The multi-Tony-nominated Dead Outlaw is a weirdly original musical that wields its originality weightily. I think I would have enjoyed it more if it weren’t so damned pleased with itself for being a little out there, but I, nevertheless, did enjoy Dead Outlaw, particularly the score, by David Yazbek — whose work I have savored for years — here working with a collaborator, Erik Della Penna, who has been Natalie Merchant’s principal guitarist for years. (You can read a piece I wrote about Natalie Merchant way back in 2002 , HERE, if you’d like).
Dead Outlaw is as loud and in your face as David Yazbek’s most delectable and successful (Tony Award-winning) musical, The Band’s Visit, was recondite and gentle. It shares The Band’s Visit’s principal artistic team, in Yazbek, director David Cromer and bookwriter Itamar Moses, which accounts for Dead Outlaw’s similar perspective on musical theater storytelling and stagecraft; an abiding faith in simplicity.
The plot of Dead Outlaw is stark, strange and fundamentally true. In 1976, the life-size figure of a cowman painted red that had hung from a noose on a wall in a California amusement park for some time, was discovered to actually be the petrified (arsenic-preserved) remains of a real man. Research revealed that his name was Elmer McCurdy, born sometime in the late-19th Century, shot dead at 31 in a failed bank robbery.
Dead Outlaw takes it from there, reimagining, or mostly imagining McCurdy’s short, violent life and after, when a coroner decided to pickle his remains, triggering McCurdy’s afterlife journey as a carnival attraction.
The big fun of Dead Outlaw, for me, was the barbed wire raw, juke joint juiced, blues-sodden joy of Yazbek and Della Penna’s score, as played by a fiery five-person onstage band, led (to my ears) by the extraordinary playing of JR Atkins on various guitars (especially pedal steel). No matter what was happening onstage, Atkins’ licks (and Atkins’ keening voice on background vocals) kept cutting through everything else to penetrate my brain and command my attention. A rare experience anywhere, but especially listening to a Broadway pit band (even out of the pit).
I also loved the dry drollery of Itamar Moses’ script, which rarely wasted a word as it raced through the lows and then even lowers of poor McCurdy’s existence, and post-existence. Similarly, David Cromer’s direction carved striking scenic arks out of sparse scenes and even sparser scenery, with a lovely, pure theatrical panache. His cast flitted through multifarious roles evocatively and sang stirringly. Andrew Durand, as McCurdy himself, commanded the stage with a futile fury while his character lived, and with astounding stretches of stillness, once he didn’t.
In the end, I found Dead Outlaw expertly crafted and kooky as hell but more of a terrific concert exercise than a fully executed musical; an extended sketch stretched to its point of expiration. The moral of the evening: “Your mama’s dead/John Gotti’s dead/Dillinger’s dead/And so are you!” was delivered with sardonic high spirits that elevated the dire message without putting it to rest. The moral, I bought completely.