A bumbling bandit becomes a Broadway star

What do a plumber, a train robber, a movie star, and a haunted house mummy all have in common? They’re just a handful of the occupations held by Elmer McCurdy, the real-life outlaw whose short life and extraordinary afterlife serves as the inspiration for the wildly wonderful new Broadway musical, Dead Outlaw. 

The quirky production, which opened at the Longacre Theatre this evening following a celebrated stint off-Broadway, is the brainchild of Emmy-winner David Yazbek, and sees him reunite with book writer Itamar Moses for the first time since their 2017 Tony award-winning musical, The Band’s Visit. This time around, the pair are singing a much different, more raucous tune as they transform Elmer’s larger-than-life story into a rollicking, country rock concert complete with a whole lot of laughs and a surprising amount of heart.

Helping to tell Elmer’s story is the show’s bandleader and emcee, played by Jeb Brown, who serves as the connective tissue between the outlaw’s life and death. He delivers the over-the-top tale in a non-linear fashion, luring audiences in with stories of Elmer’s childhood before revealing that, decades down the line, his neon red, arsenic-embalmed remains will be discovered strung up inside a Long Beach haunted house attraction by a Teamster working on an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man. (And, yes, as he states multiple times: this really did happen.) 

How does he wind up there, exactly? Well, it’s a complicated story of a complicated man. After learning his parents weren’t really his parents, Elmer (brought to life and death by Andrew Durand) becomes a raging alcoholic whose insatiable anger soon isolates him from whatever remaining family he had left. After riding the rails for several years — and settling down for a spell with a woman named Maggie (Julia Knitel) — he takes up a life of crime as maybe one of the least successful bandits in history before getting blasted away by a sheriff’s posse.

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That should, in theory, be the end of Elmer. And yet, the man somehow ends up becoming more of a celebrity in death than he ever was in life when the local coroner, having no luck in returning his corpse to any remaining relatives, decides to prop him up in a coffin and begin charging curious cowboys 25 cents a pop to lay their precious peepers on the great and infamous dead outlaw. It is the first time, but certainly not the last, that Elmer’s body is profited off of by a money-hungry opportunist: his posthumous adventures see him pawned off to traveling carnivals, wax museums, and amusement parks over the next 60 years.

And while the first half of the one-act musical establishes that Elmer was by no means a saint, it’s a true testament to Moses’ book that theatergoers will find themselves giggling away at all of the bonkers twists and turns that his second life takes, while also feeling an ever-increasing sense of sympathy and sadness for him, too. That disparity is played perfectly by Durand, who paints Elmer as a caustic spitfire in life and, later, gives an emotional performance in death without ever truly having to say a word. (In fact, Durand performs a good portion of the musical simply standing ramrod straight and giving the audience his best dead-eyed stare from inside his coffin.)

But, unlike predecessors who sought to make a quick buck at Elmer’s expense, it’s clear that the creatives behind Dead Outlaw have a deep appreciation for both the man and the mummy alike. After slicing away all of the spectacle surrounding Elmer with their signature sharp wit, they spend the second act ruminating upon the general public’s obsession with death, capitalist greed, and the ways in which we project our own visions of grandeur upon each other. In death, Elmer is the perfect blank slate: He is the ruthless vigilante that cowboys dream of catching; the spooky mummy at the back of the movie theater lobby to attract ticket sales; and, perhaps strangest of all, the household confidante of a teenage girl. The bumbling bandit has become a full fantasy.

Outside of Durand and Brown’s performances, Dead Outlaw is very much an ensemble piece. However, Yazbek and Erik Della Penna make sure that its eight leads all receive at least one moment to shine through their stellar soundtrack. Durand turns the Longacre into his own mini rock concert in “Killed a Man in Maine,” while Knitel’s packs a real emotional punch with her heartbreaking performance of “A Stranger,” and Thom Sesma absolutely blows down the house with his laugh-out-loud, unabashedly smooth and smarmy coroner-crooning hit, “Up to the Stars.” Meanwhile, the band (composed of Brown, Rebekah Bruce, JR Atkins, Hank Heaven, Brian Killeen, and Spencer Cohen) keeps the show’s electric energy buzzing throughout with its lively, country-twanged tunes that many will find themselves humming long after they’ve left the theatre. 

Due to the nature of its decades-long story, Dead Outlaw does find itself falling into the trap of becoming very exposition-heavy, often opting for its Emcee to explain or guess at what the tale’s real-life counterparts may have been thinking rather than letting its cast act it out. The show’s staging, brought to life by scenic designer Arnulfo Maldonado, is also surprisingly stripped back for such an over-the-top premise, with the only real big set piece being its Americana-themed bandstand that twists and turns throughout the show. While it certainly gets the job done, it also left more to be desired. Still, there are pockets of real beauty within Dead Outlaw, like when Durand gazes upon lighting designer Heather Gilbert’s sky full of slow-blinking stars from atop a train car.

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. Grade: B