Theatre in Review: Dead Outlaw (Audible Theatre at Minetta Lane Theatre)

	Jeb Brown. Photo: Matthew Murphy

One thing you can say about the people behind Dead Outlaw. They're not hiding anything. As advertised, the new musical is about a deceased lawbreaker's most inconvenient corpse, for which a great many people find some creative uses. Whether you find this to be a deliciously macabre joke or a mildly tedious exercise that beats a single idea into oblivion is hard to predict. I find myself voting with the latter delegation, but I can guarantee you've never seen anything like it.

To be clear, when it comes to their bizarre narrative, the creators of Dead Outlaw are making up nothing. Their antihero, Elmer McCurdy was a real-life figure in the dying days of the Old West. A comically inept bank robber, his shaky way with nitroglycerin -- a technique picked up in the Army -- usually proved counterproductive. (Sometimes he used too much, incinerating and melting the loot or accidentally blowing the safe out into the street; sometimes, he would lowball the charge, leaving the money solidly locked up. Jesse James' reputation remained unchallenged.)

McCurdy's dubious road to immortality began after his death. Shot by a sheriff's posse in 1911, his embalmed body was held as collateral by a mortician who wanted payment for his services. When no relatives appeared, the funeral home put McCurdy on display, charging yokels for a glimpse of a deceased desperado. The body later turned up in sideshows and a traveling museum of crime before the exploitation filmmaker Dwain Esper (responsible for the cinematic masterpieces Sex Madness and Marihuana) began using it as a promotional gag. According to Wikipedia, it "was placed in the lobby of theatres as a "dead dope fiend" whom Esper claimed had killed himself while surrounded by police after he had robbed a drug store to support his habit." After years in storage, the mummified cadaver ended up as a prop in a Long Beach, California dark ride, until somebody figured out the truth and called the police. Killed a few years before the outbreak of World War I, McCurdy didn't find a final resting place until the Carter administration.

It's an all-American story of cut-rate celebrity and cupidity run wild, the sort of thing that might make an entertaining piece in The New Yorker. As a stage musical, it's a much dicier proposition. The first half of Dead Outlaw traces Elmer's short, unhappy life -- scarred by an illegitimate birth, a penchant for violence, and alcoholism -- without making him especially compelling. He's a hapless figure, a born loser on the fast track to perdition, and we are left to mark time until he meets his end. But the second half, in which his remains are passed around by various shady characters, is hardly more arresting. The most interesting question is how Andrew Durand, who plays McCurdy, manages to keep deathly still, propped up in a coffin, for forty minutes or so.

Whatever Itamar Moses, the book's author, saw in this material is mysterious; his work is weak on multiple fronts, failing to make McCurdy an object of interest and allowing the chorus of bottom-feeders who profit off him to come and go without making any impression. So thin is the material that a good section of the second half is taken up with a long digression about a young Native American youth, who, during the Depression, nearly kills himself in a ghastly marathon race across the whole of Route 66, hoping the prize money will save the family farm. This is yet another event in which McCurdy was used for promotional purposes, but the sequence feels like a side trip designed to pad out the evening to ninety minutes.

The country-rock score, by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna, certainly adds some juice to the proceedings, with many songs handled with gusto by narrator Jeb Brown and an electric onstage band. The opening, featuring a melancholy ballad followed by a foot-stomping roll call of dead celebrities (including Frank James, Balzac, and Tupac Shakur) strikes the right defiant note. McCurdy also has a fine hard-rock rouser, "I Killed a Man in Maine" (which, like everything else about him, is an exaggeration). At times, however, the songs strain for effect, no more so than when Thomas Noguchi, the famed "coroner to the stars," who handled McCurdy's final disposal, breaks out with a ring-a-ding tribute to his glittering clientele. (He sings, "Oh, Natalie Wood/Or Natalie won't/Leave a legend/When she leaves that boat." Even a tragic, too-early death isn't enough to rate a perfect rhyme.)

If the director David Cromer can't impose much of a style on McCurdy's strange odyssey, he at least has some pleasant people on hand. There's something innately touching about Durand's defiant poses, his sad awareness that his life will never amount to much. Brown is a rousing bandleader, his grizzled appearance and whiskey voice adding a touch of authenticity. Julia Knitel is likable as the respectable young woman who might have saved Elmer from himself, Trent Saunders earns a deserved hand with his lengthy monologue about the Route 66 race, and Thom Sesma does everything one can with Noguchi's swinging necrology number.

Arnulfo Maldonado's set design places the band in an unfinished house or garage that moves around the stage, backed by faintly detailed, sepia-colored landscapes; it's a surprisingly drab piece of work, although it moves well. Heather Gilbert is one of the most inventive lighting designers working in New York right now, as seen here in her provocative use of color and strong sidelight looks; strangely, the first dialogue scene is staged with one overhead spot on McCurdy and everyone else in total darkness. This is, I'm sure, a directorial choice, but it certainly is counterproductive. Sarah Laux's costumes lightly touch on several eras. The sound design by Kai Harada and Joshua Millican is suitably punchy for this kind of music.

Dead Outlaw has gotten some surprisingly favorable notices -- I'm still meditating on how this is possible -- so you may consign this review to the bulging file of my outlier opinions. Still, it's hard to think of Elmer McCurdy being wanted, dead or alive. Sweeney Todd, aside, this is, I believe, the first musical to be almost entirely focused on the disposal of a corpse. I don't foresee a trend. --David Barbour