NEW YORK, NY.- In the final chapter of Elmer McCurdy’s macabre posthumous journey through the American West, his red-painted corpse dangled from a noose inside a Southern California amusement park ride: a creepy bit of decor to spook the thrill-seekers.
More than six decades after his death, poor old arsenic-preserved McCurdy was presumed to be a mannequin — until, in 1976, the TV series “The Six Million Dollar Man” came to shoot an episode at the ride, and a crew member discovered otherwise.
“This is a man!” the freaked-out Teamster shouts in “Dead Outlaw,” a mischievous but never mean-spirited ghost story of a musical about McCurdy from the creators of “The Band’s Visit.”
Conceived by David Yazbek, who wrote the “Dead Outlaw” music and lyrics with Erik Della Penna, this oddball new show reunites Yazbek with book writer Itamar Moses and director David Cromer. Based on a sensationally ghastly scrap of Old West and pop culture history that has inspired books, previous plays and a documentary, it is 180 degrees different from “The Band’s Visit,” a gently comic, Tony Award-winning tale about an Egyptian band stranded in an Israeli town. It’s also terrific fun.
“Dead Outlaw,” which opened Sunday in an Audible production at the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, is a compact, deliciously deadpan yarn that stretches over almost a century.
It traces Elmer’s hapless life as an alcoholic drifter turned bungling criminal, and his involuntary second act as a formidably well-embalmed sideshow attraction. Along the way, it casts a jaundiced eye at the callous American lust for guns and money, and takes puckish pleasure in reminding us that we’ll all be shadows like Elmer soon enough.
“Dead Outlaw” is a Western, kind of, and when at its start we meet Elmer (Andrew Durand, in a wow of a performance), he is lying under the stars in Oklahoma, singing a soft and longing country-flavored song. It is 1911 and he is alive, yet his face is deathly pale, his eyes shadowed. He is beguiling anyway. Then the show does a tonal quick change, all romance vanished: Elmer, comically, rushes off to rob a train.
At 30 or so, he is a long way from the Maine of his childhood and the fractured family he left behind: the mother who raised him in comfortable circumstances was actually his aunt; the woman he always thought was his aunt was the mother who gave birth to him as a teenager. Disaffected, aching, entitled, Elmer is looking for easy riches, which elude him thanks to his general ineptitude at being an outlaw.
It probably doesn’t help that whenever he grabs some nitroglycerin to crack a safe, Douglas MacArthur (Ken Marks) — Elmer’s old commander at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he joined the Army for a while — starts hectoring him in his head: “That’s not how you do it, maggot!”
The show takes a too-lengthy detour into the story of an ambitious young Cherokee man, possibly as a contrast to Elmer’s laziness and a rebuke to his racism. (He is sure he is more deserving of the local Osage people’s money than they are.) Weirdly, the musical exhibits no curiosity about Elmer’s birth mother, who is almost a nonpresence — though with the only woman in the cast playing his aunt, that might just be a practical consideration.
Still, this is lean-in storytelling, performed by eight actors conjuring several dozen characters. With a high-energy onstage band conducted by Rebekah Bruce and including Della Penna on guitar, banjo, vocals and wailing lap steel, the score hopscotches from country to rock to jazz. (Sound design is by Kai Harada and Joshua Millican, soundscape composition by Isabella Curry, orchestrations by Della Penna, Yazbek and Dean Sharenow.)
Audible plans to release a recording of “Dead Outlaw.” Close your eyes and you can imagine what a vivid experience that might be, a whole Western landscape painted aurally. Live, though, you get to savor the visuals: our charming narrator (Jeb Brown) transforming into a disreputable, trench-coated bandit; Elmer’s tender dance with the spunky Maggie (Julia Knitel), in his doomed attempt at love and normalcy; Durand’s unnerving turn as Elmer’s corpse, propped upright in a coffin, swaying whenever someone moves it; the gruesome prop mummy (by Gloria Sun Productions) laid out on a coroner’s table.
In a fabulous moment, that coroner, Thomas Noguchi (Thom Sesma, perfect), grabs the dangling microphone meant for his autopsy notes and delivers a big, purple-lit, nightclub-style number — a high point of the show. (Lighting, by Heather Gilbert, is superb throughout.)
Noguchi is the unlikely hero here: the sole person who looks at Elmer’s desiccated remains and sees someone deserving of dignity.
So does the show. It would be easy to exploit Elmer’s story, to play it entirely for laughs. “Dead Outlaw” has lots of those, as well as a healthy sense of absurdity. But if it forgot Elmer’s humanity — and it never does — it would lose its soul.
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‘Dead Outlaw’
Through April 7 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; deadoutlawmusical.com. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
