
‘Dead Outlaw' review: Wild corpse musical is too tame on Broadway
One hour and 40 minutes, with no intermission. At the Longacre Theatre, 220 West 48th Street.
There's a nagging similarity between the 20th-century criminal Elmer McCurdy and 'Dead Outlaw,' the eccentric musical about him.
McCurdy was killed in a shoot-out with police after a bungled train robbery in 1911. And then, in a stomach-churning turn of events, his mummified corpse was carted around the country for decades as an attraction in unsavory traveling tourist museums.
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'Dead Outlaw,' which opened Sunday at the Longacre Theatre, has also been schlepped a distance — from the cool and intimate Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village to a big Broadway house uptown.
It, too, has become a bit stiff in the process.
I quite enjoyed the scrappy first incarnation last year, and still admire the score by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna that stitches together rockabilly, campfire songs, lounge music and folk into an eerie Americana soundscape that's punchy and unsettling.
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And the clever conceit of the show from writer Itamar Moses — that McCurdy is a mostly silent cadaver for half the runtime — is smart and sad; a stinging comment on the grotesque lengths some (many, really) will go to make a buck.
But in the Broadway version of 'Dead Outlaw,' directed by David Cromer, there is a lot of dead air.
4 'Dead Outlaw,' which opened on Broadway, tells the story of a bandit who became a famous corpse.
Matthew Murphy
Well, except in the glass-shattering opener, a rascally screamer called 'Dead' that's blared by an onstage band in a shoebox that looks like a college dropout's garage. The playfully rude lyrics rattle off people who are no longer alive (the joke is that many of them actually are) and concludes with 'and so are you!' Think of the unifying cry as 'Ich bin ein Elmer!'
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The group's frontman is actor Jeb Brown, perfectly cast with a husky radio voice, who becomes the narrator — Mr. Rogers after midnight. At first the effect is like listening to a weird-but-true podcast before bed. Soon, though, the 'and then this happened's become — forgive me — overkill.
Elmer, both when pathetically alive and famously deceased, is played by Andrew Durand, an easy-to-like actor who audiences will remember as the romantic lead from 'Shucked' and 'Head Over Heels.' As his resume of curiosities would suggest, he's Broadway's go-to guy for 'odd.'
4 Elmer McCurdy's body toured the country for years after he died.
Matthew Murphy
Durand is adorably awkward as Elmer tries and tries and fails and fails to make it as even a D-List bandit.
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A violent drunk who hops from town to town, adopting new identities along the way, Durand's Elmer softly croons a lovely Ben Folds-y tune called 'Normal' and hollers a feverish one called 'I Killed A Man in Maine.' In the rambunctious latter, he hurls objects across the stage and attempts to knock down Arnulfo Maldonado's set.
In the second half, with sunken eyes and a razor-sharp jaw line — and I mean this as a compliment — he plays dead very well. The guy rarely ever blinks.
4 Julia Knitel (left) plays a variety of roles in 'Dead Outlaw,' but most movingly a little girl named Millicent.
Matthew Murphy
The show becomes more intriguing as the story grows wilder. Its most involving and moving number, in more ways than one, is called 'Millicent's Song' and is sung by a little girl whose dad has acquired Elmer's body and is storing it at their house. At first she's rightly horrified by the sight, but soon starts sweetly confiding to the dead man like a therapist.
Time passes as she grows up, funny evolves into poignant, and her conversations with the unchanging Elmer mature. Julia Knitel sings sublimely, and the song creatively ticks down the years, rather than having the narrator announce when and where we are. Again.
4 'Dead Outlaw' gets more intriguing as the story grows weirder.
Matthew Murphy
There's also a memorable cruise-ship ditty called 'Up to the Stars,' smoothly performed by Thom Sesma as the coroner as if he's Michael Buble is another dark delight. It's something out of 'Six Feet Under.' You'll either be tickled by the coroner's punchlines ('Natalie Wood? Natalie Won't') or horrified and offended.
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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.
'Outlaw' reminds me of the rebel rock musical 'Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson' crossed with a bone-dry Coen Brothers film. There's room for something so subversive on Broadway. But not when the production's energy level is that of a funeral parlor at 8 a.m.
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Review: ‘Billie Jean' at Chicago Shakes is a straightforward account of a champion's story
In the final few minutes of 'Billie Jean,' the new play with Broadway aspirations at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, we follow Billie Jean King and her spouse, Ilana Kloss, the South African former tennis player. King, one of the most extraordinary living Americans and once (frankly, still) one of the most famous women in the world, came fully out of the closet relatively late in life, and the scenes involve King's loving but traditional Southern California parents accepting the lesbian couple. Those moments are deeply emotional and, quite frankly, beautiful enough in their simplicity to bring a tear to the eye. Chilina Kennedy, the Canadian star who plays King, is finally allowed a chance to breathe and Callie Rachelle Johnson, who plays Ilana (among others), is one of those performers capable of creating a character to whom one inherently warms. King has come home in all the ways we all crave and the gravitas and challenges of her journey feel at once familiar and extraordinary. In a world seemingly bereft of heroes and heroines, these last few minutes send the audience out on a genuine high. I wouldn't normally talk about the end of a show like this, but this hardly is a spoiler for any tennis fans who have followed King's career. More importantly, this script and production would be so much better if more scenes took their time to land emotionally and felt the same way. Biographical shows about very famous, and very impressive, living people are tricky. The writer inevitably wants to please and hail the subject, who holds the keys to her own life, having been there. As we've seen with many Broadway jukebox biographies, even if the subject doesn't want a hagiography (and I can't imagine that the famously honest King did), that doesn't mean she won't get one. There's also commercial motivation: No one coming to a play about Billie Jean King is looking for something that does not celebrate her achievements. 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But I also think plays, even plays about a person as virtuous and courageous as King, also have an imperative to challenge and surprise their audiences. You don't get other points of view here on anything, at least not beyond the appearance of various stereotypical obstacles to King's progress. So when the play, say, posits the Australian player Margaret Court mostly as a villain, one cannot help but wonder what she would have had to say, given the chance. The same is true of Larry King (Dan Amboyer), who is a confusing and underwritten presence here, kinda supporting the heroine one moment and behaving like the classic controlling dude the next, so as to fit the overall narrative in which his influence must be vanquished for full self-actualization. I wonder what he would have said, too. Plus, human lives like this one are long, and they can feel that way when plays precede chronologically. 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So for those of us who have followed tennis, we already know about her astonishing 39 Grand Slam titles and her unstinting advocacy for women's tennis, especially the need to persuade the tennis establishment that women deserved to have a place to play, equal and fair compensation, and to be recognized and understood not just for their looks or as amateur curiosities but as some of the world's greatest professional athletes. And, of course, we also know what King achieved in tennis also (eventually) crushed barriers to women in other sports from golf to soccer. 'Billie Jean' tells its laudatory story very capably, thanks in no small part to a very energized and fluid production from director Marc Bruni. The show does not feature actual tennis (beyond a few stylized arm movements and sound effects), nor does it get into the tennis weeds at all; 'Billie Jean' actually never really explores what made King so good at the game besides chronicling her determination and love of winning. Some sense of her formidable technique surely would help round out the picture. The show also glosses over her first singles title, which seemed strange to me, but then there's a lot to cover in such a life. The battle with Riggs also zips by, presumably since the show well knows it already was the subject of an excellent movie. At times, it feels like you are watching a staged Wikipedia entry, frankly, given all the narrative interjections from the eight-person ensemble, not all of which are needed. But at others, playwright Lauren Gunderson's skills with poetic language really kick in, the text takes more risks of style and form and Kennedy, who is superbly cast in this difficult role, handles everything anyone hurls her way with aplomb. I'm sure many of King's fans will love this piece, which is set on a revolving tennis court set designed by Wilson Chin, but I hope the next draft deviates a little more from the straight race through an incredible American life and sits longer with the beating heart of its most human of subjects. That, after all, was Billie Jean King's actual secret weapon. Review: 'Billie Jean' (3 stars) When: Through Aug. 10 Where: Chicago Shakespeare's Yard Theatre on Navy Pier, 800 E. Grand Ave. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes Tickets: $73-$134 at 312-595-5600 and


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Best Soundtracks from Popular Movies
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