Dead Outlaw opened its doors on Broadway at Longacre Theater! The new musical presents a book by Itamar Moses, music and words by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna, and is directed by David Cromer. The Cast, Repair Their Roles from Off-Broadway, included Andrew Durand as Elmer McCurdy, Jeb Brown As Band Leader/Jarrett, Eddie Cooper As Coroner Johnson, Dashiell Eaves As Louis/Charles Patterson, Julia Knitel As Helen/Maggie, Ken Marks As George, Trent Saunders As Andy Payne Thom Sesma as Coroner Noguchi, With Emily Fink, Justin Gregory Lopez, Noah Plomgren, Max Sangerman, Scott Stangland and Graham Stevens as fitting.
Dead Outlaw is the dark and incredibly inventive musical about the bizarre real story of the Elmer McCurdy, who has become has become become. As Elmer’s body finds even more bizarre adventures in death that it could never have hoped in life, the spectacle explores fame, failure and meaning – or, a total insignificant – of heritage. Dying is not a reason to stop living life fully.
Let’s see what the criticisms say of the new musical …
Jesse Green, New York Times: And in part it is the respect that the authors show the public by letting us assemble the jokes for ourselves, using the components they provide: contrast, surprise, diagram and disturbance. Although this is already surpassing on Broadway, even more rare is the way in which the spectacle forces us, through pure and pathos -free entertainment, to think of things that our intelligence helps us to avoid. Why are we alive? As long as we are, what should we do about it? And do we have our papers in order? “Dead Outlaw” the fact. He should have a hell of life after death.
Adam Feldman, Timeout: the writing is spicy and sneaky, the songs have verve and resonance, and each element of the production of Cromer seems to be integrated exactly in place. The show was created last year as part of the Audible Theater Off Broadway programming, which is appropriate: the entire project has a series podcast, branching each time that it likes to explore a fascinating tangent with the help of Cromer’s Protean supporting players: Knitel, Eddie Cooper, Dashiell Eaves, Ken Marks, Trent Saunders and Crowd Fours Crooner). These very beautiful performers, as well as Brown and the group on stage, revolve around the extremely stable center of Durand. The 2024-2025 season was strangely full of corpses; Things to do on Broadway when you died this year include the Nazis cutting in the Mincemeat operation, telling yourself in Sunset Blvd., getting a youthful treatment in death becomes her and feeding your friends swept. But Durand takes rigor mortis at new levels of morbid rigor. It is the hardest to work on Broadway.
Emlyn Travis, Entertainment Weekly: while adaptations of popular and already established franchises continue to appear on Broadway, it is exciting to see original productions, really unique as Dead Outlaw gets up to meet them. Eccentric, silly and moving, the story of Elmer McCurdy is the one that must really be seen.
Greg Evans, deadline: but the most impressive is what Durand and all production realize by emphasizing dignity for the shortest and most banal life in life. As absurd as real life, as macabre as a monster spectacle, as brutal as a ball for the intestine, Dead Outlaw also manages to offer Elmer McCurdy something better than dignity, he offers a memory. Yes, he died. But it’s your mom too, and Abe Lincoln too, and it’s Balzac, and Anne Frank too, and, inevitably, you too. Say the names.
Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post: “Outlaw” reminds me of the rebellious musical “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” crossed with a dry coen film. There is room for something subversive on Broadway. But not when the production level of production is that of a funeral fair at 8 a.m.
Charles McNulty, Times: Musical comedy makes a fun leap in the parody of Vegas when the Coroner Thomas Noguchi (a Thom Sesma Electric) is authorized to strut his doctor. The choreography of Ani Taj, like each element of production, derives the best party from its minimalist means. Wandering errors, “Dead Outlaw” retains his credit outside Broadway in Longacre. It’s a little show that slips on you, like a bizarre dream that is difficult to shake.
Tim Teeman, Daily Beast: The Show is up to its title; A durand made up in a corpse spends so much time playing McCurdy dead – as an impassive business object and a thing ultimately left in a store store – as he does alive. Playing the daughter of a director who buys the corpse at some point, Knitel sings in McCURDY all his teenage sorrow and its banalities.
Patrick Ryan, USA Today: in the amazing “Outlaw Dead”, death is both merchant and desensitized; A cruel fact of the life with which we are hit several times in the musical. (“Your friends are dead / your dog is dead / and you too”, Grows Brown in the cheeky and breathtaking finish.) But by facing our dark deadly coil with a laugh and a song, the hair resistancing McCurdy, pulse resistance, helps us all a little more alive.
Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune: This madness was apparently the idea of Yazbek. He and Della Penna (better known as the Guitarist of Natalie Mercihant) have a lot of fun with their internal rhymes and by contrasting the magnificent music of romantic desire with characters who have no real access to their own feelings. But when it is combined with the very clever book of Moses, the show explores substantial themes, beyond its immediate objective of persuading an audience not only to face the certainty of their own death (always fun on a Saturday evening) but its own body caries. The program notes that nothing has ever been really sacred or revered on the American border, the living and the dead attracting all their price, all likely for transactional exploitation. The notion persists which has not changed so much. I do not know how the “out-of-dead outlaws” modestly on a 100-minute scale will be carried out on the Midtown market, or if enough touristy will avoid familiar and abandon the reliable life for a glance at the really distinctive.
David Cote, observe: catchy and filled with hooks and memorable words which are intelligent and touching, Yazbek and Della Penna have written what is easily the best new score on Broadway since, well, the masterful score of Yazbek for the group’s visit (which also had a superb book of Moses). Bearing influences from Frank Loesser to Britpop Band XTC, Yazbek remained one of my favorite composers for 25 years. He has a skeptical and skeptical way with the melody and the lyrics that always reminds you of his roots as a singer-songwriter (the original black comedy of Dead Outlaw referred my mind to the 1996 album The Laughing Man). With Jeanine Tesori and Dave Malloy, Yazbek is an artist who supports the hope of American musical.
Steven Suskin, New York Internship Review: The Cast of Eight – All, one of which fulfills several roles – is stellar. Andrew Durand (from War Horse, War Horse, Yank! Behind that, the sweetness of bogus eyebrows, violence and a vulgarity of the burlesque type. The requirements of the intrigue call him to spend almost half of the 100 -minute racing time by playing dead; not seated immobilized in the shadows like Floyd Collins, this other historic boy currently in Broadway, but standing up – hard projector.
Michael Sommers, New York Internship Review: The Final Attraction of the 2024-2025 Broadway season, Dead Outlaw will recall theater fans of Operation Mincemeat, the new British musical who also turns with humor around a corpse. The two based more or less in fact, these are strange programs made by small sets evoking dozens of characters. The British musical can offer the stronger dramatic arc, but the comicarity of American shaggy dogs in the history of death is strangely attractive.
Gillian Russo, New York Theater Guide: Dead Outlaw moves through his intrigue as an excess gear, most of the Itamar Moses script is based on the narration as seven remaining actors, all except Andrew Durand (as McCURDY) embodying several characters, play on the periphery of a raised platform on which Brown and his group play. The configuration of the show and the multitude of characters leave little breathing margin to invest emotionally in most of them, but for better or for worse, this is not the point.
Andrew Martini, in theory: this is where Dead Outlaw really succeeds. Despite all his irreverence and his comedy, Cromer and his team made sure that we see Elmer’s posthumous life for what she was really: twisted and exasperating in her lack of ethics. Elmer was not a saint in real life. We are not asked to sympathize. Instead, Dead Outlaw reminds us that death comes for all of us and what happens then … Well, in America? The possibilities are terribly endless.
Thom Geier, culture sauce: the global result is a visual and auditory delight, an affectionate dive in a forgotten chapter of the American past which recalls energy with a work of the bloody and bloody Andrew Jackson, but in a way that is both more anchored and less heavy. Outlaw dead discovers the corpse of forgotten history – raising a little winding thread in an elegy of the bizarre world in the way in which the American dream can curl up in violence, cruelty and relaxed indifference.
Brian Scott Lipton, Cititour: I want the show to have something more revealing to say about America’s fascination for macabre, it is the obsession of minor celebrities, or the fact that gourmet bastards are hidden in and all the cords that really. Maybe if it was, I would have found a much more rewarding “outlaw”.
Average note: 84.4%
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