Dead Outlaw Broadway Reviews

And in part it’s the respect the authors show the audience by leaving us to assemble the jokes for ourselves, using the components they provide: contrast, surprise, pattern and disruption. Though that is already surpassingly rare on Broadway, even rarer is the way the show forces us, through pure entertainment and with no pathos, to think about things our intelligence busily helps us avoid. Why are we alive? As long as we are, what should we do about it? And do we have our papers in order? “Dead Outlaw” does. It should have a hell of an afterlife.

The writing is piquant and sly, the songs have verve and resonance, and every element of Cromer’s production seems to fit exactly in place. The show premiered last year as part of Audible Theater’s Off Broadway programming, which is apt: The whole project has the spirit of a serial podcast, branching off whenever it likes to explore some fascinating tangent with help from Cromer’s protean supporting players: Knitel, Eddie Cooper, Dashiell Eaves, Ken Marks, Trent Saunders and crowd favorite Thom Sesma (as a Tinseltown coroner turned crooner). These very fine performers, along with Brown and the onstage band, revolve around Durand’s extremely stable center. The 2024–25 season has been strangely full of cadavers; things to do on Broadway when you’re dead this year include faking out Nazis in Operation Mincemeat, narrating yourself in Sunset Blvd., getting a makeover in Death Becomes Her and feeding your friends in Swept Away. But Durand takes rigor mortis to new levels of morbid rigor. He’s the hardest-working stiff on Broadway.

As adaptations of popular, already-established franchises continue to pop up on Broadway, it’s thrilling to see original, truly one-of-a-kind productions like Dead Outlaw rise up to meet them. Eccentric, silly, and moving, the tale of Elmer McCurdy is one that truly needs to be seen to be believed.

But most impressive is what Durand and the entire production achieve in insisting on dignity for even the briefest and most unremarkable of lives. As absurd as true life, as macabre as a freak show, as blunt as a bullet to the gut, Dead Outlaw also manages to afford Elmer McCurdy something better than dignity, it offers remembrance. Yes, he’s dead. But so’s your mama, and so’s Abe Lincoln, and so’s Balzac, and so’s Anne Frank, and, inevitably, so are you. Say the names.

“Outlaw” reminds me of the rebel rock musical “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” crossed with a bone-dry Coen Brothers film. There’s room for something ​s​o subversive on Broadway. But not when the production’s energy level is that of a funeral parlor at 8 a.m.

The musical takes an amusing leap into Vegas parody when coroner Thomas Noguchi (an electric Thom Sesma) is allowed to strut his medical examiner stuff. Ani Taj’s choreography, like every element of the production, makes the most of its minimalist means. Wanderingly weird, “Dead Outlaw” retains its off-Broadway cred at the Longacre. It’s a small show that creeps up on you, like a bizarre dream that’s hard to shake.

The show lives up to its title; a cadaverously made-up Durand spends just as much time playing McCurdy dead—as an impassive object of trade and a thing ultimately left in a store-cupboard—as he does alive. Playing the daughter of a movie director who buys the corpse at one point, Knitel sings at McCurdy all her teenage heartbreak and trivialities.

In the staggering “Dead Outlaw,” death is both commodified and desensitized; a cruel fact of life that we are pummeled with repeatedly throughout the musical. (“Your friends are dead / your dog is dead / and so are you,” Brown growls in the cheeky, name-dropping finale.) But in facing our bleak mortal coil with a laugh and a song, McCurdy’s hair-raising, pulse-racing resuscitation helps us all feel a little more alive.

This craziness apparently was Yazbek’s idea. He and Della Penna (best known as Natalie Merchant’s guitarist) have a lot of fun with their internal rhymes and by contrasting gorgeous music of romantic longing with characters who have no actual access to their own feelings. But when combined with Moses’s very shrewdly toned book, the show does explore substantial themes, beyond its immediate purpose of persuading an audience not just to confront the certainty of their own death (always fun on a Saturday night) but their own corporal decay. The show notes that nothing ever was truly sacred or revered on the American frontier, the living and the dead all attracting their price, all susceptible to transactional exploitation. The notion lingers that not so much has changed. I’ve no idea how the modestly scaled, 100-minute “Dead Outlaw” will fare in the Midtown marketplace, or if enough of the touristically curious will eschew the familiar and abandon the reliably living for a gander at the truly distinctive.

Catchy and crammed with memorable hooks and lyrics that are clever as well as touching, Yazbek and Della Penna have written what is easily the best new score on Broadway since, well, Yazbek’s masterful score for The Band’s Visit (which also had a superb book by Moses). Bearing influences from Frank Loesser to Britpop band XTC, Yazbek has for 25 years remained one of my favorite composer-lyricists. He’s got a witty, skeptical way with melody and lyrics that always reminds you of his roots as a singer-songwriter (Dead Outlaw’s quirky black comedy sent my mind back to the 1996 album The Laughing Man). Along with Jeanine Tesori and Dave Malloy, Yazbek is an artist who sustains hope for the American musical.

The cast of eight—all but one of whom fill multiple roles—remains stellar. Andrew Durand (of Shucked, War Horse, Yank!, and other entertainments) heads the cast as the titular desperado, and it is quite a performance. Behind that mostly ever-present scowl lie sweetness, violence, and a burlesque-type vulgarity. The demands of the plot call for him to spend almost half the 100-minute running time playing dead; not sitting immobilized in the shadows like Floyd Collins, that other historical lad presently on Broadway, but standing—dead—in a harsh spotlight’s glare. Durand manages to remain thoroughly and expressively immobile, except when he isn’t.

The final attraction of the 2024-2025 Broadway season, Dead Outlaw will remind theatergoers of Operation Mincemeat, the new British musical that likewise spins humorously around a corpse. Both based more or less in fact, they are odd shows performed by small ensembles evoking dozens of characters. The British musical may offer the stronger dramatic arc, but the American shaggy dog comicality of the Dead Outlaw story is strangely appealing.

Dead Outlaw moves through its plot like a speeding train, most of Itamar Moses's script leaning on narration as the remaining seven actors, all but Andrew Durand (as McCurdy) embodying multiple characters, act it out on the periphery of a raised platform on which Brown and his onstage band play. The show's setup and bevy of characters leaves little breathing room to emotionally invest in most of them, but for better or worse, that's not the point.

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.

The overall result is a visual and aural delight, an affectionate dive into a forgotten chapter from the American past that recalls the having-fun-with-history energy of Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, but in a way that’s both more grounded and less weighty. Dead Outlaw unearths the corpse of forgotten history — elevating a twisty little yarn into a bizarro-world elegy to how the American Dream can curdle into violence, cruelty, and casual indifference.

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.