Dead Outlaw
Opening Night: April 27, 2025
Theater: Longacre Theatre
Website: deadoutlawmusical.com
DEAD OUTLAW is the darkly hilarious and wildly inventive musical about the bizarre true story of outlaw-turned-corpse-turned-celebrity Elmer McCurdy. As Elmer’s body finds even more outlandish adventures in death than it could have ever hoped for in life, the show explores fame, failure, and the meaning—or, utter meaninglessness—of legacy. Dying is no reason to stop living life to its fullest.
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April 27, 2025
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.
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April 28, 2025
With a book by Itamar Moses and a score by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna, the musical delivers an exhilarating theatrical experience that toggles between the intimacy of a campfire story and the explosive charge of a rock concert.
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April 27, 2025
With its cast fully intact, Dead Outlaw comes to Broadway just as pointed and playful as it was during its acclaimed off-Broadway run last year. While so much has already been said about this smart, rare gem of a musical—it bears repeating.
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April 27, 2025
An unmistakable sign that musical theater is entering a thrilling new era of unlikely stories told in unexpected ways, Dead Outlaw seems destined to join the ranks of Oklahoma! and Gypsy as a show that strikingly reflects the restless spirit of this country and the breathtaking cruelty it often engenders. Elmer McCurdy is dead, but the American musical is alive and kicking ass at the Longacre Theatre.
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April 27, 2025
Following its well-received Off Broadway run produced by Audible last year, the musical retains its wickedness, vibrancy and nerve, as well as its extraordinary ensemble of actors. It also has Arnulfo Maldonado’s giant cube of a set, housing its kick-ass band, honkytonk ambiance and much of the action.
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April 27, 2025
His mortal thread is cut, and Durand spends the rest of the musical being moved around inertly in what might be the most impressive deadpan performance in history. He’s staggeringly still: You can’t even catch him blink. That same level of commitment extends to all of Dead Outlaw. 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.
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April 27, 2025
In one of the quirkiest, most morbid and somehow loveliest musicals to hit Broadway this season – even Floyd Collins‘ dying spelunker plot seems conventional by comparison – Dead Outlaw, directed by David Cromer (whose work here surpasses his accomplishments on Good Night, And Good Luck), is a very late entry in Broadway’s 2024-2025 season, and absolutely one of the best.
READ THE REVIEWApril 27, 2025
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.
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April 27, 2025
The musical has many diamonds in the rough. They’re just not polished properly by Cromer’s staging, which is awfully haphazard and diffuse for a typically sure-thing director. Scenes far off to the side feel quickly cobbled together, even though the show premiered more than a year ago.
READ THE REVIEWApril 27, 2025
Durand delivers the most indelible performance of the season as McCurdy: motionless, flat-eyed and unblinking as he stands upright in a wooden coffin for much of the show, reduced to a rifle-toting rag doll. It’s a mind-blowing physical feat, to be clear, but he also imbues the tetchy character with a potent, devastating undercurrent.
READ THE REVIEWApril 27, 2025
Macabre subject? Morbid humor? Dubious taste? You bet, crafted with wicked smarts and performed with admirable artistry. Eight versatile actors sharply depict more than sixty people, while a five-musician onstage band storms out a foot-stomping all-American score that mixes up country music, rock ‘n’ roll, and echoes of other twentieth century genres.
READ THE REVIEWApril 27, 2025
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.
READ THE REVIEWApril 27, 2025
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.
READ THE REVIEWApril 27, 2025
At one point, Cromer and his gifted lighting designer, Heather Gilbert, combine for what must be the best lighting cue of the entire Broadway season as a pinhole spot lands on Durand’s face for what feels like several minutes as the audience holds its breath, not knowing whether the corpse will speak, stay dead or break into song, the show fully understanding the possibilities posed by the magic of theater. It’s consummate Cromer and indicative of a highly unusual and highly skilled performance by a very game actor who also sings beautifully while his character is alive.
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April 27, 2025
And now, over 100 years since he died, McCurdy is the subject of a Broadway musical, where audiences are encouraged to be both horrified and humored by his story. As striking a musical as Dead Outlaw is, and for all a Broadway theater’s fancy surrounds, we’re still really at the funfair gawping at the strange life-in-death of Elmer McCurdy. Only in America.
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