Dead Outlaw
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Cititour.com Review
Dead men may tell no tales, but stories about them aren’t all equal. Take the quirkily entertaining new musical “Dead Outlaw,” now at the Longacre Theatre. The 100-minute work, directed by the always smart David Cromer, boasts an excellent, genre-hopping score by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna, and is performed exquisitely by an accomplished five-member band and a cast of eight extraordinary actors, most of whom play multiple roles.
Nonetheless, even as the final note is played, it’s a little hard to know why the show’s creators, including the talented book writer Itamar Moses, felt this mostly true-life story was so compelling.
The show’s first half relates the short, sad life of failed criminal Elmer McCurdy (soulfully played by Andrew Durand), who dies in 1911 at the age of 30 after yet another spectacularly failed robbery. Other than his continuous ineptitude, nothing about McCurdy’s life is all that interesting. Even while we see Elmer is a lost soul living out his childhood fantasy of being a latter-day Jesse James, he’s not exactly sympathetic, given his so-called profession (among other vices).
More to the point, McCurdy would be an even smaller footnote in history had his body not been embalmed with some arsenic by a local Oklahoma coroner, essentially turning him into a mummy. Indeed, for over 60 years after his death, his corpse was used in various side shows, carnivals, B-movies and, finally, as an amusement park prop (where, years later, a worker for TV’s “Six Million Dollar Man” found him and realized what had become of McCurdy).
As Moses’ book ambles and rambles, especially in the second act, there’s at least a first-rate score to keep one’s mind occupied. Among my favorite numbers is the barn-burning, nihilistic “Dead,” led by the always welcome Jeb Brown (who acts as the show’s narrator), which oddly references everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Bert Convy to Zendaya.
Fortunately, the entire cast gets its turn to stand out musically: the sublime Eddie Cooper, as a greedy if well-meaning local Oklahoma coroner, brings down the house with the vaudevillian “Something from Nothing” alongside the energetic Trent Saunders, who also shines in the story song “Andy Payne,” a tale of a marathon runner whose life briefly intersects with McCurdy’s mummy.
The versatile Thom Sesma, as soft-spoken Los Angeles coroner Thomas Noguchi, lights up the stage with a Sinatra-like turn on “Up to the Stars,” a boast about the famous corpses he’s worked on, while Ken Marks earns smiles as General Douglas MacArthur during “Blowing It Up.”
Meanwhile, the lovely Julia Knitel touches our hearts more than once; first, as Elmer’s sadder but wiser girlfriend Maggie in “A Stranger” and, later, as the unhappy teen Millicent – who relates in her own way to the mummified McCurdy – in the touching “Millicent’s Song.”
For his part, Durand (who spends a large portion of the show immobile) gets to voice plenty of McCurdy's conflicted feelings in a variety of country-western-inspired tunes, from the scorching “Killed A Man in Maine” to the sorrowful “No One Knows Your Name,” and scores time and again. It’s a performance that further cements his status as one of musical theater’s most appealing leading men.
Still, I wish the show had something more revelatory to say about America’s fascination with the macabre, it’s obsession with minor celebrities, or the fact that greedy bastards lurk in and around every corner than it actually does. Perhaps if it did, I would have found “Dead Outlaw” significantly more rewarding.
Visit the Site
https://deadoutlawmusical.com/
Open/Close Dates
Opening 4/27/2025
Closing Open-ended
Theatre Info
Longacre Theatre
220 West 48th Street
New York, NY 10036
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