NEW YORK — “Dead Outlaw,” the offbeat musical from the staff behind the Tony-winning musical “The Band’s Visit,” isn’t mincing phrases with the title. The present, which had its official opening Sunday at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre, tells the story of the unsuccessful profession of a real-life bandit, who achieved extra fame as a corpse than as a person.
Born in 1880, Elmer McCurdy, a criminal whose ambition exceeded his prison ability, died in a shoot-out with the police after one other botched practice theft in 1911. However his story didn’t finish there. His preserved physique had an eventful afterlife all its personal.
“Dead Outlaw,” a critics’ darling when it premiered final yr at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre, would be the solely musical to make the disposition of a physique an event for singing and dancing.
David Yazbek, who conceived the concept of turning this stranger-than-fiction story right into a musical, wrote the rating with Erik Della Penna. Itamar Moses, no stranger to unlikely dramatic topics, compressed the epic saga right into a compact but labyrinthine e book. Director David Cromer, whose sensibility gravitates between stark and darkish, endows the staging with macabre class.
But Yazbek, Moses and Cromer aren’t repeating themselves. If something, they’ve set themselves a steeper problem. “Dead Outlaw” is extra unyielding as a musical topic than “The Band’s Visit,” which is to say it’s much less emotionally accessible.
Andrew Durand stars in “Dead Outlaw.”
(Matthew Murphy)
It’s not simple to make a musical a few criminal with a risky mood, an unslakable thirst for booze and a document of fumbled heists. It’s even more durable to make one out of a lifeless physique that went on exhibition at touring carnivals and freak reveals earlier than ending up on show in a Lengthy Seaside enjoyable home, the place the mummified stays have been unintentionally found by a prop man whereas engaged on an episode of “The Six Million Dollar Man” in 1976.
Stephen Sondheim might need loved the problem of making a musical from such an outlandish premise. “Dead Outlaw” evokes at moments the droll perversity of “Sweeney Todd,” the cold-hearted glee of “Assassins” and the Brechtian skewering of “Road Show” — Sondheim musicals that fly within the face of typical musical theater knowledge.
As tight as a effectively thought-out jam-session,”Useless Outlaw” additionally remembers “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” the Michael Friedman-Alex Timbers musical that created a satiric historic rock present round a most problematic president. And the present’s unabashed quirkiness had my theater companion drawing comparisons with “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”
Andrew Durand, who performs Elmer, has simply the appropriate bad-boy frontman vibe. The hard-driving presence of bandleader and narrator Jeb Brown suffuses the manufacturing with Americana authenticity, vibrantly maintained by music director Rebekah Bruce and music supervisor Dean Sharenow.
Elmer strikes by means of the world like an open razor, because the title character of Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck” is aptly described in that play. A précis of Elmer’s youth in Maine is run by means of by members of the eight-person forged within the bouncy, no-nonsense method of a graphic novel.
The character’s prison path is tracked with related briskness — a fateful collection of colourful encounters and escapades as Elmer, a turbulent younger man on the transfer, seems to be for his large alternative in Kansas and Oklahoma. Destined for hassle, he finds it unfailingly wherever he goes.
Elmer routinely overestimates himself. Having acquired some coaching with nitroglycerin within the Military, he wrongly convinces himself that he has the know-how to successfully blow up a secure. He’s like a broke gambler who believes his subsequent dangerous wager will carry him that long-awaited jackpot. One benefit of dying younger is that he by no means has to confront his abject ineptitude.
Arnulfo Maldonado’s scenic design turns the manufacturing right into a fun-house exhibit. The band is prominently arrayed on the box-like set, pounding out country-rock numbers that know a factor or two about laborious residing. The music can sneak up on you, particularly when a personality provides voice to emotions that they will’t fairly get a deal with on.
Thom Sesma in “Dead Outlaw.”
(Matthew Murphy)
Durand can’t talk feelings that Elmer doesn’t possess, however he’s capable of sharply convey the disquiet rumbling by means of the character’s quick life. There’s a gruff lyricism to the efficiency that’s entrancing even when Elmer is standing up in a coffin. However I want there have been extra intriguing depth to the character.
Elmer is a historic curiosity, to make certain. And he reveals one thing concerning the American moneymaking ethos, which holds not even a lifeless physique sacred. However as a person he’s flat and a little bit of a bore. And the creators are maybe too enthralled by the oddity of his story. The present is an eccentric wallow by means of the morgue of historical past. It’s exhilarating stylistically, much less in order a critique of the darkish aspect of the American dream.
Julia Knitel has a voice that breaks up the monochromatic maleness of the rating. As Maggie, Elmer’s love curiosity for a short second, she returns later within the present to mirror on the stranger with the “broken disposition” who left her life with the identical defiant thriller that he entered it. I want Knitel had extra alternative to interweave Maggie’s ruminations. The unassuming great thing about her singing provides a lot wanted tonal selection.
The musical takes an amusing leap into Vegas parody when coroner Thomas Noguchi (an electrical Thom Sesma) is allowed to strut his medical expert stuff. Ani Taj’s choreography, like each ingredient of the manufacturing, makes essentially the most of its minimalist means.
Wanderingly bizarre, “Dead Outlaw” retains its off-Broadway cred on the Longacre. It’s a small present that creeps up on you, like a weird dream that’s laborious to shake.
