The indignities of the grave pale compared to the indignities of getting your preserved corpse placed on show as a sideshow attraction, wax museum exhibit, or amusement park horror journey prop. You might ask Elmer McCurdy all about that if he wasn’t, as among the best songs in Lifeless Outlaw, an unmissable musical stuffed with wonderful tunes, places succinctly, lifeless. Had Elmer stayed lifeless in a single final place a bit longer he might need added an look on The Six Million Greenback Man to his present biz resume.
In one of many quirkiest, most morbid and by some means loveliest musicals to hit Broadway this season – even Floyd Collins‘ dying spelunker plot appears typical by comparability – Lifeless Outlaw, directed by David Cromer (whose work right here surpasses his accomplishments on Good Night time, And Good Luck), is a really late entry in Broadway’s 2024-2025 season, and completely among the best.
With music and lyrics by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna and a ebook by Itamar Moses – Yazbek and Moses beforehand gave us the sumptuous The Band’s Go to – Lifeless Outlaw, acclaimed and award successful in earlier stagings, tells the too strange-to-be-fiction story of a real-life hapless, third-rate prepare robber of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries who wasted a younger life on booze, violence, failed love and unsuccessful crimes earlier than being gut-shot on the age of 31. After which the true story started.
As an arsenic preserved corpse, ol’ Elmer bought round and bought well-known in a method he by no means did in life. At first only a particular attraction on the funeral dwelling the place nobody got here to say him, Elmer, in a standing wood coffin with a shotgun in his fingers, his prison historical past exaggerated as if he was a protracted misplaced brother of Jesse James, quickly is bought off or traded or simply handed alongside from one freak present venue to a different, typically mistaken for a model and at last consigned within the Seventies to a janitor’s room at a fading Lengthy Seaside amusement park (his final “position” was that of a dangling man in one of many park’s spooky rides).
That modified in 1976, when a prop scout from TV’s The Six Million Greenback Man visited the outdated amusement park on the lookout for useable gadgets. When the model’s arm got here off within the scout’s fingers – bones protruding – ol’ Elmer grew to become a nationwide thriller. Who was he? How did he get right here?
Lifeless Outlaw gives the solutions. We first meet Elmer, very a lot alive (and performed by Andrew Durand of Shucked in an enchanting efficiency that ought to actually be in competition this Tony season), when he’s mendacity someplace outside at night time singing an extremely fairly and bittersweet ballad in regards to the stars and the nice and cozy wind and the dew and staking his declare on all of it by noting “I’m right here, I’m right here, I’m right here.” A prepare whistle sounds within the distance, however Elmer isn’t entranced by its high-lonesome craving – he jumps up and out of his reverie and yells to his comrades that it’s time to rob “this f*cking prepare!”
The second is simply the primary instance of the shifts in musical moods that Lifeless Outlaw will make, with one as pleasing as the opposite. Early on, Elmer breaks freed from his plotbound character to affix the band in a musical efficiency that will do any hardcore outfit proud.
Andrew Durand, Jeb Brown and band
Matthew Murphy
These rowdy numbers – the raucous, rockabilly honky-tonk band ever current on stage provides Lifeless Outlaw a country-punk rating to go together with its country-punk angle – alternate with heartfelt and heartbreaking ballads. In a single titled “Regular” Elmer, sweetly dancing with a brand new romance, ponders the fun of settling down with lady he loves, or loves at as greatest he can, and residing a life like regular people.
One other tune, the rousing rocker “Lifeless” is even carried out twice, its lyrics seeming to remind us that all of us have masses in widespread with Elmer – his destiny, minus the posthumous journey, is ours. In a twangy, high-speed rockabilly punk model, the band tells Elmer and us that every one the plots and schemes and goals come to just one finish, which the refrain of the tune is just too completely happy to spell out: “Your mama’s lifeless/your daddy’s lifeless/your brother’s lifeless/and so are you/Abe Lincoln’s lifeless/Frank James is lifeless/your mama’s lifeless and so are you.” The reprise provides a extra up to date roster of the unalive: John Gotti, Dillinger, Balzac, Tupac and Anne Frank.
“Lifeless” – carried out by the onstage rockabilly band led by actor Jeb Brown, who additionally takes half within the play correct – has the texture of an incredible barroom rouser infused with the caustic irreverence of punk singer Jim Carroll’s 1980 anthem “Individuals Who Died.”
Durand and Julia Knitel
Matthew Murphy
One other tune that, like “Lifeless” and “Regular” combines the macabre with one thing near real sentiment, is a late-in-the-show comedian quantity sung within the model of a swinging Sinatra crooner by none apart from L.A.’s well-known coroner Thomas Noguchi (Thom Sesma). As he performs the 1975 post-mortem (Elmer, at this late stage, is portrayed by a grotesque pink puppet), Noguchi, singing into the microphone meant to file his notes, performs “Up To The Stars,” pledging to do his greatest for this mummified corpse and maybe even return a few of its long-forgotten identification. However the tune’s jazzy “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” model prepares us for what additionally comes out of Noguchi’s mouth – gossipy tidbits in regards to the autopsies of Marilyn Monroe, Sharon Tate and Natalie Wooden.
“Oh Natalie Wooden!/Oh Natalie gained’t!/go away a legend/when she left that boat/Who, when and why/did this individual die?/Go fish the ocean/the place the solutions float.”
Thom Sesma as coroner Thomas Noguchi
Matthew Murphy
One other standalone tune is carried out by a personality solely tangentially related to Elmer: In 1928, to advertise the completion of the cross-country Route 66, civic organizers sponsored a footrace that took runners from one coast to the opposite. To maintain vacationers within the very lengthy occasion, varied sideshows adopted the trail as properly, together with one which featured a selected you-know-who mummy. Andy Payne, a member of the Cherokee nation, gained the race and a $25,000 prize, as recounted in a poignant ballad sung by Trent Saunders, the actor taking part in Payne. After he sings that he didn’t need to take up presents to reside the sort of freak present superstar existence bestowed on Elmer, he tells us that he returned dwelling and lived a protracted, good life, and died surrounded by household. However as he steps away from the mic, he pauses, turns again and reminds that, anyway, he nonetheless died. Nobody, this present by no means fails to remind, will get out of right here alive.
Arnulfo Maldonado’s honky tonk efficiency house is completely cluttered with musical devices, an outdated map tacked to the wall, and what appears to be like to be a long time of barroom detritus scattered about. Sometimes a desk will probably be introduced out to counsel one other bar, one other time, for Elmer to get drunk in and choose a combat, or a protected will probably be wheeled on stage for the clueless Elmer to attempt to blow up. When he’s shot and killed, nobody will declare his physique.
The forged of Lifeless Outlaw couldn’t be higher, with Jeb Brown a high quality band chief and singer guiding us alongside the story (and sometimes leaping off the band riser to affix Elmer in varied misadventures). Julia Knitel as the assorted loving if dejected ladies in Elmer’s life (and loss of life) provides the present actual coronary heart, not least when she portrays an adolescent woman whose dad is among the mid-century freak present exhibitors who shops Elmer’s coffined corpse in his dwelling. Knitel, because the lonely daughter Millicent, really forges a non secular bond with this poor misplaced soul, and the attractive ballad she sings pulls off a miracle by rendering that bond as real, not creepy.
Nearly as good as all of the gamers in Lifeless Outlaw are, the present belongs to Durand, who has kicked round Broadway for some 20 years in reveals from Spring Awakening and the Go Gos jukeboxer Head Over Heels to the 2023 crowd-pleaser Shucked. He’s raised the extent of each present he’s been in, however finally comes into his personal in Lifeless Outlaw. It’s a pleasant, indignant, typically even elegant efficiency, not least when he’s required to stay corpse-still by means of a lot of the latter half, shifting solely when jostled or because the years start to distort him in varied methods. When the actor is given an opportunity to sing as soon as once more, the chance is reduce comically brief by the the stitching-closed of his mouth.
However most spectacular is what Durand and the whole manufacturing obtain in insisting on dignity for even the briefest and most unremarkable of lives. As absurd as true life, as macabre as a freak present, as blunt as a bullet to the intestine, Lifeless Outlaw additionally manages to afford Elmer McCurdy one thing higher than dignity, it presents remembrance. Sure, he’s lifeless. However so’s your mama, and so’s Abe Lincoln, and so’s Balzac, and so’s Anne Frank, and, inevitably, so are you. Say the names.
Title: Lifeless Outlaw
Venue: Broadway’s Longacre Theatre
Director: David Cromer
Ebook: Itamar Moses
Music & Lyrics: David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna
Forged: Andrew Durand, Jeb Brown, Eddie Cooper, Dashiell Eaves, Julia Knitel, Ken Marks, Trent Saunders, Thom Sesma
Working time: 1 hr 40 min (no intermission)
