DEAD OUTLAW Reviews — Page 3

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Updated On: 5/1/25 at 02:52 PM

I didn't find it funny at all. In fact, it made me a bit queasy. I prefer darker theatre but for some reason this show left me totally cold. I was counting the minutes by the end. Just didn't get it.

Updated On: 5/9/25 at 05:16 PM

It feels to me like the creatives behind Dead Outlaw, a musical with a fine score and featuring excellent performances by the cast, made an unforced error. I understand why it happened, as they wanted a larger, dark theme to wrap around the scattered, revue-style narrative of Elmer McCurdy, alive and deceased.

But they should have spent more time exploring the dark side of the American dream instead of veering into nihilism that I thought undercut their story. The key error, ironically, is in one of its earliest and catchiest songs: Dead. It’s repeated throughout the show, and the chorus isn’t an accident. Narrative following a different song drives home the same point.

And now I am off into the land of spoilers:

bear88 said: "It feels to me like the creatives behindDead Outlaw, a musical with a fine score and featuring excellent performances by the cast, madean unforced error. I understand why it happened, as they wanted a larger, dark theme to wrap around the scattered, revue-style narrative of Elmer McCurdy, alive and deceased.

But they should have spent more time exploring the dark side of the American dream instead of veering into nihilism that I thought undercut their story. The key error, ironically, is in one of its earliest and catchiest songs: Dead. It’s repeated throughout the show, and the chorus isn’t an accident. Narrative following a different song drives home the same point.


And now I am off into the land of spoilers:

"

Very interesting. I guess there is some tension between the theme of we will all be dead and the underbelly of the American dream. I did very much appreciate the story telling on the latter. I loved that Elmer — whether the result of being given a bum deal in his childhood or because he was a bad seed (the show posits both) — was a complete failure at everything he did and had much more success as a corpse than he did during his lifetime.

I also loved the dark humor. I don’t think this is a show for everyone. But I was talking with a friend and we thought that this may be a musical for people who don’t like musicals.

Kad said: "Dead Outlaw to me was a tale of how greed and exploitation are baked into America. The feeling that permeates this country of “I deserve more than I do and undeserving others have what I should have, that everything is unfair so what’s the harm in taking advantage of a situation?”
The actual verses of “Dead” reveal the song isn’t m about the inevitability of life ending- it’s that the American people are already, in a way, dead(“hungry ghosts,” the lyrics say) in a dog-eat-dog, exploitive country, and even death isn’t an escape from that cycle.You can spend your life being a great leader like Lincoln or an inept criminal like McCurdy, but once you die, you lose control of your story and can become a means to an end by any number of Americans looking for their own power. (Lincoln, name checked in the song,is currently revivedand up for irreverent mockery over at Oh, Mary!, for instance. Not as ghoulish as a real corpse painted red, but… Lincoln’s dead)."

In Lincoln’s case, in the decades following his assassination, he was turned into an increasingly adonyne figure, largely inoffensive, for the political purposes of others. It was a less extreme version of how Martin Luther King Jr. has been turned - for political reasons - into a man who said one sentence and nothing else. Who lives, who dies, who tells your story, indeed.

Thanks, Kad, for your thoughtful defense of the show’s use of its main song. It didn’t work for me, in part because I think it detracted from doing a better job telling what I thought was its more powerful and interesting story. The ingredients are all there but the show never figures out a way to tie them together. Or perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood to hear it.

Dreamboy3, I think you’re right that Dead Outlaw might appeal to people who might dislike the sentimentality that is part of most musicals. Even Operation Mincemeat’s raucous, wild comedy gives way to an emotional tribute - and its featured song is a tearjerker. Dead Outlaw’s creators, theater veterans whose career has been built on adaptations that touch the heart, have no time for that in this musical. I respect them for sticking to their guns and writing what is a kind of punk rock show.

Updated On: 5/3/25 at 01:04 PM

Kad said: "I concede that I'm doing the work on my end to figure out, intellectually, why Dead Outlaw really works for me- work that the creators may or may not have successfully done on their own. (I also concede I tend to connect to shows on an intellectual level first and emotional level second- I really love things that give me something to turn over in my mind over and over). I think it's good for us to suss out in detail why things work or don't work for us."

I was really looking forward to Dead Outlaw and was surprised to be disappointed by it. I do think the show’s admirers, like you and many critics, are filling in the gaps that the creatives didn’t succeed in doing. I liked the idea of the show, and what I thought I would be getting, more than the actual musical I watched. But maybe that’s just me, responding to what I saw as the show’s missteps in a way that’s just unique to me. I couldn’t shake the Assassins comparison, but contrasting any new musical to Sondheim probably isn’t fair.

I still liked a lot of Dead Outlaw, and listening to the partial cast recording yesterday reminded me of a lot of what I enjoyed.

"Dead Outlaw" will be the ONLY musical from this season that will be remembered and constantly revived over the next 50 or 60 years. It has the intellectual attraction of a Sondheim musical (I'm sure if Broadway World was around for a good portion of Early Sondheim these same "confused" posters would treat the master's gems the same as some on here do "Dead Outlaw") and the kind of score that will eventually be embraced by theatre kids and piano men alike. .

It's great because the ideas and themes are not force fed or preachy. Instead skillful. A relief from many shows these days who spell it out.

PipingHotPiccolo said: "chrishuyen said:
I find this discussion interesting because in the larger picture I can see how all the themes of capitalism/death/legacy/etc appear in the show, but at least in the two times that I was watching the show, I never felt like those themes were as deliberately woven in as those insomething like Assassins or even other shows on Broadway right now. It really felt like Yazbek and co. were kind of like "here's a cool story we feel like more people should know about" and just wrote a musical about that without necessarily delving into those themes in particular"

This is exactly my impression--its just a wild story they wrote music about. Why does it have to be deeper than that? ALSO its a story that is so quintessentially American it inevitably has something to say about American capitalism, tale-telling, historical expansion, etc. etc.

it works, is what matters."

My problem is though that I'm not sure it does work for me. Obviously it does for a lot of people and I'm not trying to take away from that but while I found it fairly diverting as light entertainment the first time I saw it, I thought it seemed rambling and aimless the second time. Which is why I'm surprised people seem to think this is a show that will be remembered for its themes down the line. Sure, it touches on a lot of parts of American culture and history but I don't think it really made me think or consider anything in a different light, and outside of a great score and a curiosity of a story I found it somewhat forgettable. Like I said though, it's cool to see that others found more to dive into on this but I just didn't personally feel the same.

I originally had no interest in seeing this. I just started listening to the first part of the cast recording. I’m really enjoying it. How does the recording compare to the live performance?

I'd say the clarity on the recording is much better than hearing the songs live. A lot of the rock songs are loud in the theatre, making it hard to understand the lyrics. But it's otherwise a good representation.

Updated On: 5/6/25 at 11:06 AM

Has anybody gotten tickets for this through TDF? Curious why they're putting folks.