Audible Theater’s World Premiere of Dead Outlaw Announces Casting

Audible Inc. has announced full casting for the upcoming world premiere musical Dead Outlaw, which will run February 28-April 7 at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre. The musical will also be recorded and released on Audible at a later date.

Directed by Tony Award winner David Cromer (The Band’s Visit, Prayer for the French Republic), Dead Outlaw was conceived by Tony Award winner David Yazbek (The Band’s Visit, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) and has music and lyrics by Yazbek and Erik Della Penna and a book by Tony Award winner Itamar Moses (The Band’s Visit).

Dead Outlaw’s cast will feature Jeb Brown (Beautiful: The Carol King Musical), Eddie Cooper (Parade), Andrew Durand (Shucked), Dashiell Eaves (A Christmas Carol), Julia Knitel (A Letter to Harvey Milk), Ken Marks (Mamma Mia!), Trent Saunders (Hadestown), and Thom Sesma (Pacific Overtures). Understudies include Emily Fink, Austin Ku, George Merrick, and Max Sangerman.

The creative team includes Ani Taj (movement direction), Dean Sharenow (music supervisor), Arnulfo Maldonado (scenic design), Sarah Laux (costume design), Heather Gilbert (lighting design), Kai Harada and Josh Millican (sound design), Isabella Curry (soundscape composition), Rebekah Bruce (music director), Erik Della Penna, Dean Sharenow, and David Yazbek (orchestrations), and Faye Armon-Troncoso (properties). 

Dead Outlaws is based on the true story of Elmer McCurdy, an ambitious, turn-of-the-20th-century outlaw whose death at the hands of a Western posse ended a life of failed crime and alcoholism and began a career as a mummified side-show attraction that travelled the USA for decades. His desiccated body was hanging in a house-of-horrors ride at an amusement park in Southern California, spray-painted a day-glo orange, when a grip for the Six-Million Dollar Man TV show jostled what he thought was “just a dummy” and an arm fell off, revealing a human bone and beginning a hunt for the origins of this enigma.

Yazbek had been haunted by this true story for thirty years when he told his friend and bandmate Della Penna and they started writing songs for a stage-piece based on this odd life and these universal yet somehow very American themes. Realizing they were onto something unique and challenging, they approached Yazbek’s The Band’s Visit collaborators Moses and Cromer.