Dead Outlaw (Play)

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    2025 Tony Awards: George Clooney, Sarah Snook and Sadie Sink Among Nominees

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    The new musicals “Buena Vista Social Club,” “Death Becomes Her” and “Maybe Happy Ending” tied for the most Tony nominations, with 10 each.George Clooney, Mia Farrow, Sarah Snook and Sadie Sink all picked up Tony nominations on Thursday as Broadway began its celebration of an unusually starry season.In a robust season with 14 new musicals, three tied for the most nominations, with 10 each: “Buena Vista Social Club,” “Death Becomes Her” and “Maybe Happy Ending.” And Audra McDonald, who has already won a record six competitive Tony Awards, set another record: she picked up her 11th nomination for her role in “Gypsy,” making her the most-nominated performer ever.The nominations were announced at the end of the most robust Broadway season since the pandemic. Box office grosses are approaching prepandemic levels amid a bumper crop of 42 show openings. Several productions have drawn much-desired young audiences, and the season featured a mix of quirky and original shows alongside big-brand spectacle. But the industry faces challenges too: Ticket prices, especially for the hottest shows, have become out-of-reach for many, and fewer shows are turning a profit as the cost of producing has risen.The closely watched race for best new musical, bizarrely enough, features three shows concerning dead bodies: “Dead Outlaw,” which tells the story of a train robber whose corpse became an attraction; “Operation Mincemeat,” about a strange-but-true World War II British intelligence operation involving disinformation planted on a corpse, and “Death Becomes Her,” a stage adaptation of the film about two undead frenemies. The other two contenders are “Buena Vista Social Club,” about the group of beloved Cuban musicians, and “Maybe Happy Ending,” about a relationship between two robots.Hue Park, who wrote “Maybe Happy Ending” with Will Aronson, said the nominations affirmed a stunning turnaround for the show. “We had a very rough start, and we were not sure if the show would stay running,” Park said. “Being an original story, not based on famous IP, was the biggest challenge in the beginning, but at the same time for that reason the entire theater community has tried to support us, and that is one of the main reasons the show is still surviving and getting these nominations.”Three new musicals tied for the most nominations, with 10 each: “Maybe Happy Ending,” “Buena Vista Social Club” and “Death Becomes Her.” We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Dead Outlaw’ Review: This Bandit Has Mummy Issues

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      A truly twisted yarn about a long-lived corpse makes a surprisingly feel-good Broadway musical.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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      9 Best Theater Moments of 2024

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      “The Outsiders,” “Sunset Boulevard” and “Ragtime” were among the productions with stage moments that stood out this year.Climate protesters disrupting a performance of “An Enemy of the People,” the outdoor walking scene in “Sunset Boulevard” and the giggles prompted by a character’s reaction to a hunky celebrity’s glutes in “Hold On to Me Darling”: The rewards of live theater were aplenty this year. Here, nine other stage moments that especially stood out, listed chronologically. NICOLE HERRINGTONExpert FloppingSutton Foster does some playful mugging in “Once Upon a Mattress.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSutton Foster’s performance as the unorthodox Princess Winnifred in “Once Upon a Mattress” was full of playful mugging. But it was in the show’s indelible scene that her best physical comedy shone through: sprawling atop a tower of mattresses stacked on a pea, flailing, flopping, hopping and then propped, rear-end up, like a fitful child protesting bedtime. It’s the kind of clowning that few can pull off with Foster’s ease and charm. MAYA PHILLIPSCoroner’s Cabaret ActAndrew Durand, left, and Thom Sesma in the musical “Dead Outlaw.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe beguilingly strange new Off Broadway musical “Dead Outlaw” retold the true tale of an Old West bank robber whose mummified corpse landed, in 1976, on the Los Angeles autopsy table of Thomas Noguchi, coroner to the stars. Noguchi is this dark comedy’s conscience — and in Thom Sesma’s performance, a fabulous showman, too. Grabbing the dangling microphone intended for postmortem notes, he delivered a slab-side nightclub number, boasting of celebrities he had cut up. Suddenly, surreally, death was a cabaret. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESVirtuosic ViolenceA balletic rumble in “The Outsiders” is stagecraft at its best. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Best Theater of 2024

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      Broadway roared back, but the kitties were downtown and the prayer service was in Brooklyn.Broadway always looks its healthiest around the holidays, and indeed, right now, most of its 41 theaters are lit, with the rest soon set to load in new tenants. Box office grosses, if not quite back to prepandemic levels, seem likely to meet or exceed last year’s $1.6 billion. But the real health of the commercial theater, for me, is demonstrated by how much it offers its audiences, not its investors. That’s why, most years, my list of best shows is top-heavy with the provocative work being brewed Off Broadway. If my latest list tilts the other way, perhaps that reflects Broadway’s liberal borrowings from the noncommercial sector — borrowings and often improvements. My Top 10, listed chronologically and covering the period from December 2023 through the end of November, are therefore mostly shows that, wherever they started and wherever they wind up, put a premium on provocation, sure, but also entertainment. That’s what I call healthy.‘Appropriate’ by Branden Jacobs-JenkinsSarah Paulson, center, in her Tony Award-winning performance in “Appropriate.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMost plays about racism dramatize the damage done to its victims. But “Appropriate,” which opened last December in a Second Stage Theater production, looks instead at the sickening effects that hatred can have on its perpetrators — and their heirs. On the surface a “dividing the estate” play, with the children of a good ol’ boy squabbling over their inherited real and unreal estate, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s uproarious tale of family guilt (directed by Lila Neugebauer and with a blistering, Tony-winning performance by Sarah Paulson) was in effect a corroded mirror reflecting America’s worst (and worst-kept) secrets. (Read our review of “Appropriate” and our profile of Paulson.)‘Terce: A Practical Breviary’ by Heather ChristianThe new year brought with it a new prayer, if you were willing to go to a former Sunday school in Brooklyn to find it. At the Irondale Center in Fort Greene, a large cast of “caregivers and makers” offered an unusual liturgy, performing Heather Christian’s ritual of praise for “the divine feminine.” The visionary composer’s typically catholic musical references — plainsong, gospel, electronica, soul and New Orleans funk — short-circuited rational analysis, inviting transcendence in much the way the rituals of the established church do. But this time, in Keenan Tyler Oliphant’s richly welcoming staging, the transcendence was for everyone, of any faith or none. (Read our review of “Terce.”)‘Dead Outlaw’ by David Yazbek, Erik Della Penna and Itamar MosesAndrew Durand, in the coffin, as the title character in the Off Broadway musical “Dead Outlaw.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe afterlife of a mummy sounds more like an “I dare you” literary project than a hook for a good-time musical. But the mostly true story of Elmer McCurdy — wastrel, roustabout, schnook and sideshow attraction — got a brilliant coda in this Off Broadway show at the Minetta Lane Theater. The lovingly serious direction by David Cromer tempered the absurdity of the tale with sweetness and humor, and the cast, let by Andrew Durand as McCurdy, responded to the tumbleweed of a score with gorgeous singing. It’s the kind of musical you’d never find on Broadway — except that you might, next year. (Read our review of “Dead Outlaw” and the story behind the show.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Dead Outlaw,’ a Mummy Musical, Is So Strange It Can Only Be True

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      The creators of “The Band’s Visit” reunited to tell the story of an outlaw whose body toured carnivals for decades.When the composer David Yazbek approached his “Band’s Visit” collaborator David Cromer in 2019 about directing “Dead Outlaw,” a high-energy song cycle that he was developing into a musical, Cromer wasn’t sure he was the right fit.“One of the first things he said was ‘I don’t tend to go out just to hear music; I want more than that,’” said Yazbek, who envisioned a show with an onstage band, interstitial narration and a minimal set. “‘And so maybe I’m the wrong person for this.’”“No, no, no,” Yazbek reassured him. “That makes you the right person. We’ve already got the rock-band-sounding-great part nailed down.”Unlike “The Band’s Visit,” the gently comic, Tony Award-winning tale about an Egyptian band stranded in an Israeli town that takes place over a single night, “Dead Outlaw” is a rollicking thrill ride about a bumbling turn-of-the-20th-century outlaw whose body becomes a traveling, decades-long sideshow exhibited across the country.It also happens to be true.“It’s what I’ve been calling documentary musical theater,” Itamar Moses, who wrote the books for “The Band’s Visit” and “Dead Outlaw,” said over dinner in Greenwich Village with Yazbek, Cromer and Erik Della Penna, who wrote the music and lyrics for “Dead Outlaw” with Yazbek.The rockabilly musical, which is scheduled to run through April 14 at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, tracks the ineffectual, booze-filled career and subsequent death, in a 1911 shootout, of Elmer McCurdy, whose involuntary second act has inspired books, plays and a BBC documentary.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Dead Outlaw’ Review: Not Much of a Bandit, but What a Corpse

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      The creators of “The Band’s Visit” return with this mischievous ghost story of a musical based on an odd slice of Old West history.In the final chapter of Elmer McCurdy’s macabre posthumous journey through the American West, his red-painted corpse dangled from a noose inside a Southern California amusement park ride: a creepy bit of décor to spook the thrill seekers.More than six decades after his death, poor old arsenic-preserved McCurdy was presumed to be a mannequin — until, in 1976, the TV series “The Six Million Dollar Man” came to shoot an episode at the ride, and a crew member discovered otherwise.“This is a man!” the freaked-out Teamster shouts in “Dead Outlaw,” a mischievous but never meanspirited ghost story of a musical about McCurdy from the creators of “The Band’s Visit.”Conceived by David Yazbek, who wrote the “Dead Outlaw” music and lyrics with Erik Della Penna, this oddball new show reunites Yazbek with the book writer Itamar Moses and the director David Cromer. Based on a sensationally ghastly scrap of Old West and pop culture history that has inspired books, previous plays and a documentary, it is 180 degrees different from “The Band’s Visit,” the gently comic, Tony Award-winning tale about an Egyptian band stranded in an Israeli town. It’s also terrific fun.“Dead Outlaw,” which opened Sunday in an Audible production at the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, is a compact, deliciously deadpan yarn that stretches over almost a century.It traces Elmer’s hapless life as an alcoholic drifter turned bungling criminal, and his involuntary second act as a formidably well-embalmed sideshow attraction. Along the way, it casts a jaundiced eye at the callous American lust for guns and money, and takes puckish pleasure in reminding us that we’ll all be shadows like Elmer soon enough.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More