Dead Outlaw review: Wild corpse musical is too tame on Broadway
One hour and 40 minutes, with no intermission.At the Longacre Theatre, 220 West 48th Street.There’s a nagging similarity between the 20th-century criminal Elmer McCurdy and “Dead Outlaw,” the eccentric musical about him.McCurdy was killed in a shoot-out with police after a bungled train robbery in 1911.
And then, in a stomach-churning turn of events, his mummified corpse was carted around the country for decades as an attraction in unsavory traveling tourist museums.“Dead Outlaw,” which opened Sunday at the Longacre Theatre, has also been schlepped a distance — from the cool and intimate Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village to a big Broadway house uptown.It, too, has become a bit stiff in the process.I quite enjoyed the scrappy first incarnation last year, and still admire the score by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna that stitches together rockabilly, campfire songs, lounge music and folk into an eerie Americana soundscape that’s punchy and unsettling.And the clever conceit of the show from writer Itamar Moses — that McCurdy is a mostly silent cadaver for half the runtime — is smart and sad; a stinging comment on the grotesque lengths some (many, really) will go to make a buck.But in the Broadway version of “Dead Outlaw,” directed by David Cromer, there is a lot of dead air.Well, except in the glass-shattering opener, a rascally screamer called “Dead” that’s blared by an onstage band in a shoebox that looks like a college dropout’s garage.The playfully rude lyrics rattle off people who are no longer alive (the joke is that many of them actually are) and concludes with “and so are you!” Think of the unifying cry as “Ich bin ein Elmer!”The group’s frontman is actor Jeb Brown, perfectly cast with a husky radio voice, who becomes the narrator — Mr.
Rogers after midnight.At first the effect is like listening to a weird-but-true podcast before bed.
Soon, though, the “and then this happene...