DEAD OUTLAW Reviews- Page 5

[Scarywarhol]

Posted: 6/3/25 at 10:21pm

I finally got a chance to see this and thought it was a pretty fantastic time. I felt like I was back in the 2000s...not in a nostalgic way, but in feeling the show's actual newness, in seeing really dark, surreal, smart, and almost confrontational musical theater on Broadway again. It's been a while.

 

I don't know if it hung together allllll the way for me thematically, but every moment was theatrical and engaging and tonally complex, with a lot of excellent tunes in a bunch of connected idioms. (Will say I couldn't hear the lyrics to "Dead" as mixed in the theater, and was relieved when I realized the whole show wasn't going to be like that.) It was a show that trusted its audience to handle a lot of wildly conflicting creative and emotional impulses, which is worth it because they always add up to something so interesting, existential, and entertaining. I laughed a lot while feeling genuinely sad and anxious.

 

Great cast. I remember Jeb Brown from back in High Fidelity (which I loved) and Spider-Man, he has such a cool voice and it's great to see him shine in a role like this. This narrator character is almost like something out of Assassins, a delicious part.

 

I vastly preferred this to The Band's Visit. Respect as always to Yazbek for writing a score that is stylistically unlike any of his others, but always with his own clear sensibility. That's a sign of true talent, artistry, and craft.

 

What's the deal with the cast album being released in parts? (Out of sequence?) Bit bummed that I can't hear so many of the songs I liked. 

[Scarywarhol]

Posted: 6/3/25 at 10:24pm

Oh, and though simple, I loved the set. Beautifully lit, too. The pine box walls of the stage looking like a landscape or knots of wood was really effective and moving without really ever calling much attention to itself. 

[bear88]

Posted: 6/4/25 at 5:18am

While I have outlined my qualms about Dead Outlaw earlier in this thread, it’s a musical that probably suffered for me because of my own elevated expectations. The partial release of the cast recording, along with a few videos, reinforced the musical’s strengths: the strong performances and its impressive score. 

The show’s defenders make good points. The very American themes of the show are, to some extent, baked in the cake. It’s all right there. While I would have preferred a stronger thematic throughline instead of the cheekiness in some of the lyrics of ‘Dead,’ that’s really more of a quibble.

There aren’t many scores in recent years to feature so many great songs - ‘Normal’ and ‘A Stranger’ are quiet heartbreakers, especially in retrospect. ‘I Killed a Man in Maine’ and ‘Indian Train’ are rockers with disturbingly timely themes that were both delivered clear as a bell by Andrew Durand when I saw it. The former ends with one of Jeb Brown’s hilarious bits of narration. ‘Something from Nothing’ sums up the show, in many ways. ‘Up to the Stars’ gives Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas Noguchi, the musical’s unlikely hero and voice of reason, a chance to cut loose.

In some respects, the musical suffers from its own unique, off-center perspective. I spent days trying to figure it out, eventually comparing it (unfavorably) to Assassins. But that isn’t quite right either. The structure of the two shows is different, even if both address the dark side of the American dream.

While my own view of Dead Outlaw has gotten more positive, I am not surprised it’s struggling at the box office.  I really liked Maybe Happy Ending, and it gives the audience an entry point that’s familiar as well as characters to care about. That show addresses darker themes but stays bright - literally.

Dead Outlaw has multiple scenes that take place in partial darkness on the edges of the stage. That’s not unlike the way these characters are on the periphery of American life, even if some are just trying to make a few bucks off a corpse. 

Updated On: 6/4/25 at 05:18 AM

[Kad]

Posted: 6/4/25 at 9:18am

I think a big part of its struggle at the box office is that the marketing has been really all over the place and very unclear. They haven’t been able to concisely pitch the show- which, admittedly, the show itself doesn’t make very easy. Their initial launch was rooted in Coney Island sideshow, but their key art is western outlaw imagery, now they’re carting Andrew Durand around the city in the coffin in an attempt to create a viral thing. They’ve been slow to get the music out front and center, they were slow to have inexpensive tickets available in previews (and didn’t do any kind of box office event). It’s just sort of baffling. 

[Scarywarhol]

Posted: 6/4/25 at 10:20am

I'm also all in favor of simple, graphic show logos but this one doesn't communicate anything to prospective ticket buyers. It feels like they chickened out of putting a red skull behind that bandana or something, maybe with the Ds in DEAD as eye sockets. Just nothing about it makes you lean in and say "What's THAT about?" 

 

I think about that '05 Sweeney logo, which is of its time, but I remember as a teenager seeing Sweeney's eyes in the razor and thinking "I've GOT to know what this show is." My friends and I all rushed it as soon as we could with no real previous Sondheim knowledge. 

Updated On: 6/4/25 at 10:20 AM

[bear88]

Posted: 6/4/25 at 1:11pm

Kad said: "I think a big part of its struggle at the box office is that the marketing has been really all over the place and very unclear. They haven’t been able to concisely pitch the show- which, admittedly,the show itself doesn’t make very easy. Their initial launch was rooted in Coney Island sideshow, but their key art iswestern outlaw imagery, now they’re carting Andrew Durand around the city in the coffin in an attempt to create a viral thing. They’ve been slow to get the music out front and center, they were slow to have inexpensive tickets available in previews (and didn’t do any kind of box office event). It’s just sort of baffling."

I have been watching Dead Outlaw’s Instagram feed too, and it feels both too late and ineffective. As you point out, it’s not the easiest show to market. It is, by definition, a strange hybrid of a musical with two hard-to-pitch elements: an incompetent, unlikable protagonist who dies halfway through the show, and then an all-over-the-place revue. In this season, the idea that a dead person would play a key role in the story isn’t terribly unique.

Even the show’s strength - its music - is tricky, because its very diversity makes it difficult to sum up. ‘Something from Nothing’ probably does that better than any song in the show, but it too doesn’t totally work - and isn’t sung by any of its nominated stars.

One of the reasons I was expecting the musical to lean more into its very American themes is that it would create a more compelling way to tell its dark story. But I’m also not sure that would sell either. My Assassins comp illustrates the problem: Assassins is an admired musical. It was never a hit.

I don’t disagree that the producers made mistakes in marketing the show and in failing to take advantage of the momentum from last year’s off-Broadway run. I am just wondering how much that would have mattered.

Updated On: 6/4/25 at 01:11 PM

[everythingtaboo]

Posted: 6/4/25 at 1:55pm

They did a pre-record for THE VIEW yesterday, I was supposed to be in the audience but had to cancel. Keep a look out!

[Fordham2015]

Posted: 6/4/25 at 5:53pm

The View performance will air tomorrow.

Julia Knitel also performed "A Stranger" for Playbill: 

https://playbill.com/article/video-julia-knitel-performs-a-stranger-from-dead-outlaw-in-the-playbill-studio

[Fordham2015]

Posted: 6/5/25 at 1:10pm

Julia Knitel performs "Millicent's Song" with corpse Andrew Durand on The View

https://www.instagram.com/p/DKhtPHCguax/

[EDSOSLO858]

Posted: 6/6/25 at 6:17pm

Noah Plomgren is making his Elmer debut tonight. 

[Fordham2015]

Posted: 6/13/25 at 6:54pm

Anatomy of a Tony Awards Performance: How Dead Outlaw Brought Their Show to the World

https://playbill.com/article/anatomy-of-a-tony-awards-performance-how-dead-outlaw-brought-their-show-to-the-world

[bear88]

Posted: 6/13/25 at 7:11pm

Fordham2015 said: "Anatomy of a Tony Awards Performance: HowDead OutlawBrought Their Show to the World

https://playbill.com/article/anatomy-of-a-tony-awards-performance-how-dead-outlaw-brought-their-show-to-the-world"

That’s fascinating, and a ridiculous amount of work. This was the first time I realized the band was pre-recorded, which makes me wonder how much of the rest of the telecast was pre-recorded. 

[auroraspice62]

Posted: 6/13/25 at 8:36pm

All of the show performances will have pre-recorded their own orchestras, but each show will have one of their conductors live on the video monitors to make sure the performers are keeping up with the track as if it were live. This year, at least, I believe the conductors were on the 4th floor of Radio City. 😉

Updated On: 6/13/25 at 08:36 PM

[Charley Kringas Inc]

Posted: 6/21/25 at 7:51pm

I really enjoyed this, even with some reservations, the primary one being that this really belongs off-Broadway. That's not a comment on the quality of the material, but the format itself, which reminded me of something like Ride the Cyclone or some of Malloy's smaller works. Shagginess can be a benefit to a show in a more intimate venue, but here I found myself wishing for just a little more. A little more structure, a little more spectacle, a little more body.

The score is marvelous. Rich, tuneful, and varied, though I did find myself preferring the more musical-theatre numbers over the rock numbers. The rock numbers weren't bad by any means, but most of the other numbers are so strongly pointed that the rock numbers felt disorganized in comparison. Normal, Blowin' it Up, Millicent's Song, Up to the Stars, and Crimson Thread were all huge stand-outs.

I was also totally blown away by the depth of the acting. These characters feel incredibly lived-in and the actors bring a frankly astonishing amount of personality and history to what are basically a series of bit parts, which helps tremendously to anchor the individual scenes. Those scenes in Maine and Kansas, where he's growing up and then falling in love, felt as unexpectedly rich as any great production of Our Town, and I wish the show as a whole was a little better at leveraging that towards the conclusion.

As others have mentioned, Assassins looms over this show for various reasons, but I weirdly found myself thinking of Robert Ashley's Improvement, which (at least in part) explores the unsettling way life slips by us in a series of arbitrary incidents, only to be obliterated by time. Dead Outlaw mines a similar existential vein in the second half as his increasingly mummified corpse meets a series of characters who extract something from him and then go off and live their lives and die.

That accumulation of time is so affecting, and it makes me wish the two halves were tied together just a little more strongly, because it feels like there's a little extra something hiding in there that could be brought out. The eventful uselessness of McCurdy's life, examined in fine detail, contrasted with the dozen-odd glimpses we get of other lives. The expansive inner life, the lies we tell ourselves, the truths that only we know, all the ways we get lost within our own selves, versus how we perceive others in shorthand, use them for our own needs, discard them when necessary.

The excellent acting and score help to lift a lot of these themes up, but I honestly wish this had been a proper two act show, if just to help develop and emphasize those ideas. It's already split exactly down the middle by McCurdy's death, which makes it feel oddly unwieldy as a one-act. Cynically, I get the sense that part of bringing this to Broadway was to boost its potential life in licensing, because this feels ready-made for regional and college productions, so I'm not terribly surprised that it came to Broadway unenlarged, but I can't help but imagine this show beefed up.

Definitely go see it if you can. Whatever qualms I had, this is a genuine, earnest work of art with a fantastic score and some of the best musical acting I've seen in a long time, and it made me feel something legitimately mystical. I really, really hope this finds its feet in local productions, because it absolutely deserves it.

[bear88]

Posted: 6/22/25 at 4:50am

Thanks, Charley Kringas Inc., for your thoughtful review. As someone who also liked, but was occasionally frustrated by Dead Outlaw when I saw it, I too have been tempted to try to figure out ways to improve it. But after a few weeks to reflect, I think I haven’t given the musical enough credit for what it did achieve. As you point out, there’s so much strong material in the show - the Maine and especially the Kansas scenes are so economically told that they serve as miniature one-act plays by themselves. The performances are strong across the board, and my latest obsession from the score is the least representative of the musical - “Normal,” wonderfully performed by Andrew Durand and a moment of sweet and romantic calmness in the midst of chaos, wry comedy, and incohate rage.

Dead Outlaw is such an American story, driven by Elmer’s demons - which may or may both be attributable to the losses in his childhood; the show is agnostic on that point - and then the people he meets along the way, especially after he’s a corpse. “Killed a Man in Maine” is a fiercely sung rocker by Durand’s Elmer, a pathetic plea of a drunken loser, and an unsettling commentary on American culture today. Elmer is building a ridiculous myth of himself, one that will destroy him, but that doesn’t mean he is not a dangerous man.

The featured performers make the most of their small roles. Julia Knitel’s “A Stranger” is a standout for me, but so is Eddie Cooper’s “Something From Nothing,” a song from Elmer’s first coroner that feels like the musical’s thesis statement more than the admittedly catchy “Dead.” Thom Sesma makes a meal of his role as the show’s unlikely hero, Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas Noguchi. He’s smart, loves his job, and gives Elmer dignity - and then he gets to cut loose with “Up to the Stars.” 

A show that’s this rich with smart commentary on human nature, as well as being quite funny, shouldn’t be unsatisfying. My critiques reflected a desire that the musical tie its many threads together, but that was probably too much to expect. Dead Outlaw presents a bizarre tale that leaves a lot to ponder with a twisted grin.