We take a look at what is being said about the the new musical about Elmer McCurdy.
The New York Times: “And in part it’s the respect the authors show the audience by leaving us to assemble the jokes for ourselves, using the components they provide: contrast, surprise, pattern and disruption. Though that is already surpassingly rare on Broadway, even rarer is the way the show forces us, through pure entertainment and with no pathos, to think about things our intelligence busily helps us 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” does. It should have a hell of an afterlife.”
TheatreMania.com: “Dead Outlaw is profoundly, wickedly irreverent, with lyrics that elicit side-by-side laughs and gasps, like when a chorus of hucksters cries out for Elmer, “I need him for my circus! / For the window of my store! / I also have a purpose I could use a mummy for.””
Time Out: ***** “The writing is piquant and sly, the songs have verve and resonance, and every element of Cromer’s production seems to fit exactly in place.”
New York Theatre Guide: “Dead Outlaw surely has an implied message about making the most of life and the horror of profiting off a human, even a criminal one, who couldn’t object even if his jaw hadn’t been wired shut. But mostly, it’s as gleefully lurid as the sideshows and wax museums that once seized on the real McCurdy, telling his story with all the bombast of a carnival barker telling morbidly curious crowds to step right up, folks. Dead Outlaw, too, is entertainment for a paying audience, after all.”
Entertainment Weekly: “As adaptations of popular, already-established franchises continue to pop up on Broadway, it’s thrilling to see original, truly one-of-a-kind productions like Dead Outlaw rise up to meet them. Eccentric, silly, and moving, the tale of Elmer McCurdy is one that truly needs to be seen to be believed.”
Deadline: “But most impressive is what Durand and the entire production achieve in insisting on dignity for even the briefest and most unremarkable of lives. As absurd as true life, as macabre as a freak show, as blunt as a bullet to the gut, Dead Outlaw also manages to afford Elmer McCurdy something better than dignity, it offers remembrance.”
New York Post: ““Outlaw” reminds me of the rebel rock musical “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” crossed with a bone-dry Coen Brothers film. There’s room for something so subversive on Broadway. But not when the production’s energy level is that of a funeral parlor at 8 a.m.”
Daily Beast: “The show lives up to its title; a cadaverously made-up Durand spends just as much time playing McCurdy dead—as an impassive object of trade and a thing ultimately left in a store-cupboard—as he does alive. Playing the daughter of a movie director who buys the corpse at one point, Knitel sings at McCurdy all her teenage heartbreak and trivialities.”
USA Today: “ingeniously directed by David Cromer, whose production is arrestingly lit by Heather Gilbert, with kooky, homespun scenic design from Arnulfo Maldonado.”
Observer.com: “This darkly exhilarating musical has what is easily the best new score on Broadway, written by by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna, and an irreverent yet wistful book by Itamar Moses.”
New York Stage Review: ***** “Loping into the Longacre at the tail end of this up-and-down season, here’s an iconoclastically anarchic romp that blasts its way through traditional showmaking to create an original new musical that’s adventurous, unconventional, consistently entertaining, and an altogether rip-roarin’ bull’s-eye.”
Theatrely.com: “or all its irreverence and comedy, Cromer and his team have ensured that we see Elmer’s posthumous life for what it really was: twisted and maddening in its lack of ethics. Elmer was no saint in real life. We’re not being asked to sympathize. Instead, Dead Outlaw reminds us that death comes for us all and what happens next…well, in America? The possibilities are frighteningly endless.”
To find out more about the show visit: https://deadoutlawmusical.com/