Out on the plains, around a campfire, the violent drifter sings a beautiful song. “The sky is black but filled with diamonds / You can almost hold them in your hands” goes the yearning lyric, with a fingerpicked accompaniment and twangs from a lap steel guitar.
But listen a little longer. “Up there God is preaching,” the man continues, bitterly. “Laughing while you’re reaching.” And then this amateur Nietzsche, wondering why he should care about a universe that evidently does not care about him, jumps up with his gun to go rob a train.
That’s the gorgeously perverse opening of “Dead Outlaw,” the feel-good musical of the season, if death and deadpan feel good to you. As directed by David Cromer, in another of his daringly poker-faced stagings, the show is to Broadway what a ghost train is to an amusement park, with screams and laughs but much better music.
That it should be on Broadway at all is a scream and a laugh. Developed by Audible, and performed last year at the 390-seat Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, “Dead Outlaw” was a critical darling and insider hit, the kind that seems to do best doing least. No matter how cosmic its concerns, it was deliberately small — eight performers, five musicians, one set — and deliberately niche. It was not, in other words, for all markets.
Yet here it is, surprisingly intact, at the 1,048-seat Longacre Theater, where it opened on Sunday in the biggest market of all.
You know what else is surprisingly intact? That singing bandit. Born Elmer McCurdy in 1880, he spends his first 30 years on earth alive, the next 65 not. The embalmer did a good job.
The funny-gross story is largely true, and feels even truer as pared to the bone by Itamar Moses in the musical’s terse, brisk, sure-footed book. After that campfire prologue, and a barnburner of a welcoming number that establishes the theme — “Your mama’s dead / Your daddy’s dead / Your brother’s dead / And so are you” — the narrative cuts to Elmer’s childhood in Maine, normal on the surface, wackadoodle underneath. Let’s just say he already has mummy issues.
Drawn to violence even at play, Elmer (Andrew Durand, terrific) is an angry soul, or rather, as a later song puts it, “just a hole where a soul should be.” As he grows, he tries to fill that hole with alcohol, which can always be counted on to find the fights he’s looking for. After one of these fights, he flees to a Kansas boomtown where he hopes he might live a normal life, with a job and a girl. Backed up by a narrator played with wolfish charm by Jeb Brown, he sings, “Don’t know what I want to be / Just as long as it ain’t me.” But no, he can’t even be that.
The songs, by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna, set harsh ideas to rowdy music that somehow makes even nihilism catchy. The piquant result, as played with glee by the guitar-forward band, will remind you less of Yazbek’s recent Broadway scores — “The Band’s Visit,” “Tootsie,” “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” — than of his 2000 debut, “The Full Monty,” with its scrapy, scrappy grunge. Or perhaps it’s his album “Evil Monkey Man,” with Della Penna on guitars, that feels most like “Dead Outlaw,” in a genre you might call cheerful melancholy.
But after McCurdy is killed in a shootout in 1911, the polarities flip to melancholy cheer. The progress of his embalmed corpse across thousands of miles in seven decades with dozens of abuses is noted in scenes as sharp and vivid as the stations of the cross, albeit funnier. In the song “Something for Nothing,” it dawns on the undertaker who performed the autopsy (Eddie Cooper) that he can monetize the abandoned corpse. (Two bits a peep.) In 1928, Elmer is the unlikely mascot (and sideshow attraction) for a cross-country foot race. Some years later, stored in the home of a B-movie director — a mummy makes a great extra in an exploitation flick — he becomes the confidant of the director’s teenage daughter.
“I’m Millicent,” she says upon meeting him. “But everyone calls me Millie.” Which in Julia Knitel’s dry-as-dust performance is somehow hilarious.
By the time Elmer winds up, in 1976, on the dissecting table of Thomas Noguchi, Los Angeles’s so-called coroner to the stars, he is a horribly shriveled thing, with DayGlo red skin and deciduous fingers. (The mummy is the work of Gloria Sun, but for most of the second half of the show Durand plays his own corpse, beautifully.) And though Noguchi (Thom Sesma) may be the first man to treat postmortem Elmer with dignity, or at least with clinical propriety, he is like everyone else in getting weird pleasure from his encounter with the corpse, as we learn in his Sinatra-style 11 o’clock number.
“Dead Outlaw” is about that strange reaction. For a show content to offer itself as just a fabulously twisted yarn, that’s in fact its big subject: How humans are excited, as if recognizing a long-lost relation, by their intermittent and usually unacknowledged adjacency to death. Cromer makes sure we acknowledge it though, in his uncanny pacing (including a 42-second eternity of silence) and in the work he draws from the designers. That effort is all of a piece: the musicians crammed onto their rotating coffin of a bandstand (sets by Arnulfo Maldonado), the sound (by Kai Harada) full of mournful train whistles and erratic heartbeats, the clothing (by Sarah Laux) rumpled as if for an eternity, the lighting (by Heather Gilbert) often vanishingly dim.
So why with all that darkness is “Dead Outlaw” so funny? Why does a long concrete chute sliding slowly onto the stage without any comment produce a huge laugh? At another moment, why does a safe that shoots off in the other direction do the same thing?
In part it’s the extreme discipline of the performances. Even playing as many as 13 characters each, the ensemble members (including Dashiell Eaves, Ken Marks and Trent Saunders as sad sacks, hucksters and Douglas MacArthur) never resort to shortcuts or winks.
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.
Dead Outlaw
At the Longacre Theater, Manhattan; deadoutlawmusical.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
