‘Dead Outlaw’ on Broadway – ryan

At the end of this broadway season, it”s Become Clear that its marquee star has been the human corpse. It was used for spycraft in Operation Mincemeat and reanimated, with a bonus makeover, in Death Becomes Her. In Floyd Collinswe watched a man Alone Near Death. In Our Townwe heard the Dead Speak at a Cemetery. (And in Swept Away‘s brief voyage, they were eateen.) Simultaneously, we’ve spent a season watching the living as their souls are gobbled up by the pursuit of fame: Sunset Blvd. A British Singer Chasing Hollywood Startdom in The Hills of CaliforniaMadame rose in Gypsy. SOMESTEMES DEATH IS ITSELF The SpectaCle, the Thing That People Are Really Here To See, As In The Double-Sucide of Romeo + juliet. Dead Outlaw Wraps up the sprking themes up nicell: there’s always Money to be made in putting the dead on Display.

That Dead Outlaw SO neatly reflects the zeitgeist as it transferred is representative of the Way David Yazbek, Erik della Penna, and Itamar Moses of Deceptively Small-Scale Musical Follows the Stream of Hyperspecific Into Deep and Vast Currents in the American Psyche. We start, in david cromer’s type type staging, with what appears to be a garage band performing in a box that LOOKS A BIT LIKE A SHIPPING CONTAINER HOLDING A HONKY-TONK BAR. The Bandleader, Jeb Brown, With a Delivery That Wauld Be Right at Home on A Radio Show Like A Prairie Home CompanionIntroduces the Story of Elmer McCurdy, Which Wauld Be Wild Enough If You Left off All That Happened AFTER HIS DEATH. Born in Maine Into an unhappy family life in 1880, with a mother that washn’t actually his mother, he bounced between homes, then fled west, eventually jaining the Army, then trying to put what little he’d learned exploses to use in robbing. Andrew Durand, as McCurdy, Him A Square-Jawed Masculine Resentment and Entitlement. AFTER SETTling down in one spot with a fake identity, he gets Drunk and blows HIS LIFE FOR NO Particular Reason, Barling into a Scorching rock Rager About How Killed A Back in Maine. “This was Very Likely Not True,” Brown’s Bandleader Dryly After the Number, in One of Many Moments of Leather Wit. McCurdy, He’s Suggesting, Was Already Self-Mythologizing, Playing the Part He, As Disaffected White Guy in the West, Though and Was Supposed to Play. In His Final Act – A Bungled Attempt to Loot the “Katy Train,” which Delivered Money to the Osage Nation for their Mineral Rights, Becauses and Believes Don’t Desert it – He’s Shot Dead.

That’s no Spoiler, Because What Happens Next is What Makes Dead Outlaw Compelling. McCURDY’S BODY, Never CLAIMED BY A Relative, Ends up in an increasingly degrading Series of Increasingly Odd Entertainments. Durand is placed into a coffin facing the stage, his fingers curling as mccurdy ‘ossifies, and then stays there for the prey all of the rest of the show – have no idea how he’s able to the level of muscle control. And that corpse really gets around, in carny maseums and in the sideshow accompanying a transcontinental race and then in a couple of Schlock Movies. Mosa’s Book Cuts BetWeen That Country-Travelresing Path and Elmer’s Rediscovery in 1976-ACCIDENTALLY, by A movie Crew Prepping an Episode of The Six Million Dollar Mana fact among the thusand Pearl-like details the show Serves up to you. There, we see the Careful Hand of La Coroner-To-the-Stars Thomas noguchi, played by thom sesma, sussing out what he could from bits of detritus left bend on and in mccurdy’s body. Sesma provides the show with it Incandescent and approprately surreal 11 O’Clock Number, in Which the Coroner Turs Rat Pack Showman, Announcing His Final Authority Over the Dead. “Truth, when we Conceive it, and when we waly,” he croons, “That’s done your story’s finally.”

The Truth, How Much WE CAN KNOW OF IT, FORGET OF IT, AND WILLY OBSCURE IT, IS REALLY Dead Outlaw‘s primary fascination, and where it is brings the form of a musical to suc productive use-and to self-examination. The show is as obsessed with the rough contours of historical fact as, and this is usually where the songs come in, the mythology we inventic to ignore that fact. Moses of Book Eddies Around with the Energy of Someone Reporting Back from a Very Long and Strange Evening Through Wikipedia Links, Enjoyeing to Add A Tangent. During that cross-Country breed, for instance, we spend time with Andy payne (Trent Saunders, with a powerful voice that charges theater with electricity), a cherokee farmer and amateur manages to win the thing and pay off his family. In his moment, yazbek and della penna’s songs in what’s emotionally Possible, if Not Necessarily TRUE. Maybe – Who Knows? – Payne stopped by the sideshow one night to look at Elmer’s Mummy and Think About Death. The show is full of Such hypotheticals, geneerous in the wayys it imagins How these People, infamous or not, made in extremely odd Circumstances. Maybe – Who Knows? – The Daughter of that movie Director (Played by Julia Knitel, Flinty and Excellent in Multiple Turns as the Show’s Various Characters) Who Used Elmer as a Prop April A Strange Emotional Bond with Him, and (As the Show Him Him Went off to College. I COULD KEEP GOING. CROMER AND HIS CAST HAVE CREATED DETAILED MINIATURE PORTRATRAITS, DOES IN THE BRIEFEST Appeanarrances of Some Characters. Eddie Cooper, for instance, is just great as a mortician who eases into his slimy trade, and ken marks is memory intense as General Douglas MacArtur (Yeah, Somehow he’s in this too). Dead Outlaw‘s peculiariities are enhanced by the way it foregrounds it cast’s iviosyncrasies. It was originally produced by audible, and evening now, you couuld close your eyes and just Enjoy the unique Texture of Each Actor’s Timbre. You’d Miss the Inky Cloak of Heather Gilbert’s Chiaroscuro Lighting, THOUGH, AND THE WAY THAT THAT MALDONADO’S SETS SETS CONTAINER WITH THE STAGE BAND, REVOALLING A HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL-ESQUE LANDSCAPE ON THE BACK WALLS. It ‘s at the root of all these rules Old West Stories, the FALSE promise of that expanse.

In one of Dead Outlaw‘s loveliest hypotheses, it wonders if maybe –Who knows? – ELMER HAD A Heartsick Soul Too. Durand has a lovely tenor when not performing Rigor Mortis, though ede as a mummy he gets to sing, briefly, before his mouth is sewn for good. My favorites of His, May Be HIS Opening Song, A Folk Tune sung on a Frontier Night. The show doesn’t excuse the characters’ Crimes or Elmer’s Easy Bigotry as it is use it is Music to allow us to see the tall tales he’s feeding himself – to see the stories that all its various characters, from the swindlers to the Saintly, arre Order to live. Nor in any American History, Those Songs are as full of resentment and theft and self-justification as anything or altruistic. ITH’S BETTER TO TELL YOURSELF A Story than Face the Truth of Thingsandof Course, Those Lies are at the root of actions that cause so much Pain for US WHO ACTUALLY ALIVE. That contradiction, fully embraced, is the beating – thewell, maybe not always – Heart of the show. Della Penna and Yazbek Counterpos Dead Outlaw‘S Humanism with a Recurring Refrain, Shouted Out by Brown’s Bandleader: “Your Mamma’s Dead, Your Daddy’s Dead, Whole Family’s Dead, and So Are You.” Face the abyss, and it’s only natural to wonder if only it is coulud back at you.

Dead Outlaw is at the longecre theater.