Capitalism Comes For the Wild, Wild West in DEAD OUTLAW — Review

With its cast fully intact, Dead Outlaw comes to Broadway just as pointed and playful as it was during its acclaimed off-Broadway run last year. While so much has already been said about this smart, rare gem of a musical—it bears repeating. 

Dead Outlaw is brought to us by the award-winning team behind The Band’s Visit, though it bears little to no resemblance to that quiet, introspective piece. Once again, director David Cromer, book writer Itamar Moses, and composer/lyricist David Yazbek have teamed up to bring us something fresh and original. This time, Yazbek has joined forces with Erik Della Penna to create a rock ‘n roll and bluegrass-inflected score, one that perfectly suits this must-be-seen-to-be-believed Western.

Telling the true story of bumbling criminal turned posthumous sideshow attraction Elmer McCurdy, Dead Outlaw dives into the American absurd with a certain kind of verve and inventiveness rarely seen on Broadway these days. With a winking, irreverent tone, it skewers the uniquely American ethos of making a buck wherever you can, even if by dubious means, and the hucksters who seem to have no qualms about doing so.

In its slight 100 minutes, the musical covers a lot of ground, starting with Elmer’s childhood in Maine, where he discovers the man and woman he thought to be his father and mother are actually his aunt and uncle, and the woman he’s always known as his strange aunt to be his real mom. He devolves into violence and drinking, eventually heading west to Kansas, where he makes a bid for normalcy—complete with a steady job and marriage prospects—but that violent restlessness that drove him from his home returns and he’s forced to leave town. Following a stint in the army, Elmer is arrested in Kansas and catches the eye of Jarrett, another outlaw, who believes Elmer’s training in the army, specifically with nitroglycerin, will help him and his gang blow up vaults and rob banks. The only problem is: Elmer is hopelessly inept at everything he does. Every criminal enterprise he sets out on ends in failure until he’s shot dead by a sheriff’s posse in 1911 at the age of 31.

It’s then that the rest of Elmer’s life begins. 

When no next of kin shows up to claim his body, the undertaker, Coroner Johnson, embalms the body with arsenic in order to preserve it until someone from Elmer’s family comes knocking. While he waits, tales of Elmer’s outlaw past are greatly exaggerated until people are clamoring to see the dead outlaw themselves. Johnson begins charging folks to see the body. It then garners the attention of traveling carnival owners, who buy the corpse for their own entertainment purposes. In a series of sordid deals, Elmer’s corpse is exhibited in sideshows until it’s bought by Hollywood director Dwain Esper and displayed in lobbies to help promote his movies. Finally, Elmer’s corpse is bought by an amusement park in Long Beach, California, where it’s used as a prop in a funhouse until a teamster from the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man tries to move it, thinking it’s a prop, only to discover that it is, indeed, the corpse of a real man.

As the hapless and angry Elmer, Andrew Durand is a live wire. With vocal pyrotechnics and a crazy gleam in his eyes, Durand channels the desperate pulse beneath Elmer’s ineptitude. Elmer is downtrodden and disaffected, someone who learned too young that entire lives can be built on lies. 

The rest of the expert ensemble play a cavalcade of criminals, sheriffs, coroners, carnival operators, and Hollywood-types. Standing out among them is Jeb Brown, the show’s emcee, known as the Bandleader, who steps into the action when needed, but keeps the story moving from a distance. He plays guitar with the terrific onstage band, led by Rebekah Bruce.

I would be remiss not to highlight Julia Knitel and Thom Sesma, as well. Knitel’s turns as Maggie, Elmer’s first love, and Millicent, the daughter of Hollywood director Dwain Esper, who supposedly kept Elmer’s corpse in the house, are some of the piece’s most affecting and delightfully absurd moments. As Coroner Noguchi, who’s tasked with performing the autopsy on Elmer’s corpse 65 years after his death, Sesma gets the show’s best number: “Up to the Stars,” a hilarious and unexpected send up of America’s fascination with celebrity death that turns Noguchi into a leering cabaret act. 

Arnulfo Maldonado’s boxcar set resembles an unfinished basement that houses Brown and the band. It’s jam-packed with Americana and string lights that hang from its exposed plywood. It gives the sense that Brown has assembled his band here, yes, to jam out, but also to tell us a story in the ancient tradition of storytellers throughout the ages. 

While Elmer’s corpse is being used in a sideshow that travels along Route 66 as a part of the 1928 Trans-America Footrace, the show takes a moment to home in on Andy Payne, played by Trent Saunders, a member of the Cherokee Nation, who won the race in an effort to pay off his family’s farming debts. Despite being promised a life of fame and notoriety following his win, Payne returns home to lead a quiet life. He’s an excellent foil to the men who have ruthlessly exploited Elmer McCurdy’s corpse without a thought to the man himself, a man who never stood a chance to rise above his own means.

It’s there that Dead Outlaw really succeeds. For all its irreverence and comedy, Cromer and his team have ensured that we see Elmer’s posthumous life for what it really was: twisted and maddening in its lack of ethics. Elmer was no saint in real life. We’re not being asked to sympathize. Instead, Dead Outlaw reminds us that death comes for us all and what happens next…well, in America? The possibilities are frighteningly endless. 

Dead Outlaw is now in performance at the Longacre Theatre in New York City.