Rollicking is a word perhaps falling out of use, but it’s a good one for Dead Outlaw, an ensemble and country rock band comic musical about the preposterously improbable life and afterlife of Elmer McCurdy, feckless bank robber of the early 1900s whose mummified corpse was a sideshow attraction into the 1940s. Oh, and promotional device for 1930s exploitation filmmaker Dwain Esper.
The show-stopper song is “Up in the Stars,” sung and swung by Thom Sesma as Los Angeles County Cornoner Noguchi, a medical professional who’s seen a thing or two. Ring-a-ding-ding! Andrew Durand is McCurdy: it’s the only time that you’ll read “stiff” as complement for an actor. Carrying the narrative ball of wax through time and space is good ole boy Jeb Brown as narrator and Bandleader.
Props to the technical crew, who manage to bring a loaded concrete mixer onstage for Elmer’s final rest, and to deftly turn the quick striking of a set piece into a sight gag.
- Dead Outlaw, music and lyrics by David Yazbek and Eric Della Penna, book by Itmar Moses, orchestrations by Della Penna, Dean Sharenow, and Yazbek, directed by David Cromer, Longacre Theatre, New York