Review: Dead Outlaw, a Thrillingly Macabre New Broadway Musical

As we contemplate the end of a century of American dominance, it’s a great time to examine the circumstances of our rise—the ingenuity, dynamism, and exploitation that built a global empire. Dead Outlaw, the new musical at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre, feels like an autopsy, a gruesome look at the American genius for monetizing absolutely everything.

It’s about Elmer McCurdy (Andrew Durand), a wayward boy raised at the end of the 19^th century who grows into a luckless man in the 20th. He throws away his one shot at middle-class respectability with a good woman (Julia Knitel), spends a period in the army under the explosive tutelage of Douglas MacArthur (Ken Marks with machine-gun diction), and turns to a life of crime with amateur bank-robber Jarret (Jeb Brown, doubling as narrator). And that’s where his life story ends, shot dead at 31.

It’s also where his extraordinary afterlife begins. When no one claims the body, the coroner (the hilarious Eddie Cooper) puts Elmer on display to recoup costs, charging 25 cents to see the dead outlaw. His corpse is bought and sold over the years, exhibited in wax museums, horror movies, and eventually a fun park dark ride on the Long Beach pier. Finally, in the bicentennial year of 1976, a set dresser for The Six Million Dollar Man discovers him, acknowledges his humanity, and sends him to LA County coroner Thomas Noguchi (Thom Sesma as a name-dropping LA County crooner), who identifies the body as that of McCurdy, a man who died in 1911.

This is a true story.

It’s also a radical gearshift for the Tony-winning team behind The Band’s Visit. David Yazbek (music and lyrics), Itamar Moses (book), and David Cromer (direction) have reunited, joining songwriter Erik Della Penna (who did not work on The Band’s Visit) to create a musical that feels miles away from that dreamy dip into love and possibility.

Dead Outlaw is profoundly, wickedly irreverent, with lyrics that elicit side-by-side laughs and gasps, like when a chorus of hucksters cries out for Elmer, “I need him for my circus! / For the window of my store! / I also have a purpose I could use a mummy for.” This is the darkest side of American capitalism, and sound designer Kai Harada makes sure we hear every word. If Hamilton is the face we like to present to the world, Dead Outlaw is our portrait in the attic.

It arrives highly acclaimed, having made its world premiere last year with Audible off-Broadway, where it won a slew of awards. The complete cast has transferred with it to Broadway in a production that is simultaneously tighter and grander.

David Cromer has long been the director with the most sensitive appreciation for theatrical lighting, but his collaboration with designer Heather Gilbert is a master stroke. In the early scenes, characters emerge from the periphery, their half-remembered faces shrouded in darkness. Dead Outlaw has the feeling of a live documentary, an attempt to reconstruct the life of a poor man for whom few records were kept. We chart the passage of time through Sarah Laux’s ever-changing period costumes. The lighting intensifies with the emotional pitch, occasionally reaching rock concert levels.

Yazbek and Della Penna’s score tracks the development of American music, lustily pillaging from standards, showtunes, country, and (especially) rock. The band remains center stage for most of it, serving as the main engine for storytelling, with characters taking their place at the mic.

Trent Saunders is magnetic as Andy Payne, a Cherokee man who runs a cross-country footrace, for which Elmer was a sideshow attraction. Brown is a soothingly avuncular narrator of this disturbing tale. And Knitel, the only woman in the cast, proves to be a vital presence in what is very much a dudes’ musical. She breaks our hearts when she looks down at Elmer’s cold body and sings, “The man I was to marry was a man I didn’t know.”

As that central stranger, Durand is giving one of the most exhilarating and physically demanding performances on Broadway. He’s a feral rock frontman in the song “Killed a Man in Maine,” radiating the white-hot rage that drives a man to wealth or death. It curdles into resentment by the time he sings “Indian Train,” in which he convinces Jarrett and his posse to rob a train carrying mineral royalties to the Osage Nation. That jealousy proves to be his undoing, with Durand settling into an eerie stone-cold stillness that he impressively maintains for the back half of the show. Frankly, it comes as a relief following the erratic drunken violence he exhibits while alive.

Elmer is a bad man, but does that make his humanity forfeit? In his probing, unsentimental, and darkly funny book, Moses shows us how the desecration of a corpse comes to be seen as not only justifiable, but unremarkable as successive custodians launder the memory of the real human being who once animated Elmer’s body, allowing later owners to pass him off as a dummy, or not think too deeply about it. And why would they when there’s money to be made?  That’s the fuel powering the American machine: bodies, typically living, but not in Elmer’s case. To echo Mr. Potter’s cruel observation in It’s a Wonderful Life, he’s worth more dead than alive—at least on a balance sheet.

An unmistakable sign that musical theater is entering a thrilling new era of unlikely stories told in unexpected ways, Dead Outlaw seems destined to join the ranks of Oklahoma! and Gypsy as a show that strikingly reflects the restless spirit of this country and the breathtaking cruelty it often engenders. Elmer McCurdy is dead, but the American musical is alive and kicking ass at the Longacre Theatre.