Dead Outlaw

Dead Outlaw 

By David Yazbek, Eric Della Penna, and Itamar Moses 

Directed by David Cromer 

The Audible Theater 

New York, NY 

April 13, 2024 

Reviewed by Elliot Lee 

The first song in Dead Outlaw, a new musical by David Yazbek, Eric Della Penna, and Itamar Moses, prepares its audience to make peace with the inevitable: “Your mama’s dead / Your daddy’s dead / Your brother’s dead / And so are you,” the singers wail. “Balzac is dead / Tupac is dead / Anne Frank is dead / And so are you!” 

Directed by David Cromer at the Audible Theater, the musical recounts the life of nineteenth-century outlaw Elmer McCurdy, narrated through gritty country rock played by an onstage band. Halfway through the musical, McCurdy dies. The rest of the show traces his afterlife, from the coroner’s office to the discovery of his shriveled, orange spray-painted remains among the décor of a defunct rollercoaster ride. In the first half of the play, Andrew Durand gallivanted around an ever-shifting wooden frame, evocative of a barn strewn with fairy lights. As the titular outlaw, Durand executed impressive feats of vocal and physical prowess, climbing, pushing, and hanging upside down from various parts of the frame while singing. After his character’s death, Durand spent the rest of the show standing stock-still, carted around in an uncovered coffin as other characters sold and mistreated his dead body. The story transforms from an outlaw tale into an unsettling exposé of how entertainment immortalizes, profits, and desecrates memory. On Audible Theater’s stage, Dead Outlaw’s message about exploiting the dead became a self-referential jab at the popularity of biographical musicals on and off Broadway. 

Biographical musicals take inspiration from historical figures, tracing a life from childhood until death. Dead Outlaw falls into this genre but takes it one step further into McCurdy’s afterlife. However, while biographical musicals tend to be linear, Dead Outlaw is more experimental in structure. In form, it is a concept musical, a genre stitching together songs driven by theme and character. Specifically, Dead Outlaw’s vignettes are tied together by McCurdy’s physical body, initially offering snapshots from his life, and later, depicting the various people and places his corpse encounters. At the Audible Theater, the absurdity of these vignettes brought the audience into a more self-conscious relationship with McCurdy, transforming him from a character into a symbol. Dead Outlaw’s concept musical form allowed it to subvert expectations of the biographical musical as well as (metatheatrically) question commercial theatre’s obsession with dead people’s lives. Dead Outlaw thus exposed the exploitative nature inherent in a genre that profits from history. “Now I’m an entrepreneur . . . Death is a business to me!” 

While other biographical musicals pick and choose from scattered life events to create a palatable narrative, Dead Outlaw does not build McCurdy up as a hero or a villain. Instead, the production made McCurdy realistically mediocre, in personality and in outlaw work. In the character’s short life, Cromer created equally arresting vignettes of magic and despondency. In one moment, McCurdy twirled his first love under glittering fairy lights. In the next scene, drums echoed the familiar rhythms of McCurdy downing drinks at the bar. Not only was McCurdy abrasive, racist, and flighty, but he also proved to be an incompetent outlaw in Cromer’s well-timed comedic sequences. In one sequence, McCurdy and an army friend hatched a plan to steal from townsfolk, only to be arrested before committing a single crime. In another, McCurdy sang a stirring number about robbing a train carrying a royalty payment to the Osage nation, only to end up on the wrong train. 

Dead Outlaw also critiques a theme often at the heart of the biographical musical genre: legacy (one famous example is Hamilton’s titular character, obsessed with the legacy of his political work to the point of neglecting his familial responsibilities). As an ambitious young man, McCurdy is no exception, but Dead Outlaw’s story extends beyond his life to show the disturbing consequences of legacy through the ordeals of his corpse. After cycling through various professions in a Pippin-esque pursuit of purpose, McCurdy finally achieves fame upon dying. When nobody retrieved his corpse, the coroners displayed him as an attraction, singing, “See the dead outlaw! ... Something from nothing at all!” Crowds spin McCurdy’s deeds into grand tales of cowboy daring in show-stopping ensemble numbers, admiring him as a relic of a bygone West. Once on display, McCurdy’s body mummified in the heat of the coroner’s office, staged through a sequence in which Durand contorted inside his coffin. Exploited, sold, and paraded around the stage in pastiches of sideshow grit and glamour, McCurdy’s corpse was passed from owner to owner. Lastly, rotting away as a beachside attraction, staff wired shut McCurdy’s jaw, silencing Durand for the remaining half hour of the show. Dead Outlaw tells the story of McCurdy getting the legacy he wanted and the grim consequences of being remembered forever. 

This message was most effective when stark shifts in design and impressive physical acting allowed the show’s dark irony to give way to a total confrontation with the abject. For example, when McCurdy’s mummy was forgotten in a storage facility, Durand stood in an entirely dark theatre for an uncomfortable minute of total silence. Sitting with Durand in the darkness elicited both uncomfortable laughter and sobbing from the audience. These moments served as a reminder of the cadaverous quality that could elude any living, breathing portrayal: decay, evoking both repulsion and recognition. Through these moments of theatricalized abjection, McCurdy’s corpse physicalized the desecration of memory. The production turned the horrific implications of legacy into something tangible and vile. 

Dead Outlaw’s concept musical form allowed it not simply to criticize its own genre, but also its audience. Concept musicals can use the affective delight of song and dance against the audience before implicating them in their uncritical enjoyment of the material. As audiences clapped along to country rock, they realized too late that the musical in front of them was the latest in McCurdy’s tortures. By encouraging musical biographies to be retold, the audience became complicit in keeping McCurdy’s legacy alive. Dead Outlaw thus makes itself the biographical musical to end biographical musicals.