‘New York audiences like weird': ‘Dead Outlaw' cast and creatives on their ‘freight train' of a musical
'It really feels like the most personal show to me,' reveals David Yazbek about his new musical Dead Outlaw. The composer has written music and lyrics for six Broadway productions and has earned Tony Award nominations for each one, winning for The Band's Visit in 2018. Of his latest effort, Yazbek says, 'The reason why the story of Elmer McCurdy has stuck with me for decades is because it works on a lot of different levels, and the deepest level for me has to do with mortality and desire.' Yazbek and many of the cast and creatives of Dead Outlaw recently sat down with Gold Derby and other journalists at the 2025 Tony Awards Meet the Nominees press event.
The darkly comic Dead Outlaw chronicles the life and truly bizarre afterlife of McCurdy, a man born in Maine who moves West and unsuccessfully tries his hand at a life of crime before getting gunned down by a sheriff's posse. McCurdy's body was never claimed at the mortuary, and subsequently traveled around the United States for 60-plus years and displayed in wax museums, sideshows, Hollywood films, and amusement park rides before finally being identified and laid to rest in Oklahoma.
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The score's cowriter Erik Della Penna, a first-time Tony nominee this year, says that while the score encompasses many different styles of American music, the songs came 'organically.' 'I don't think there was a whole lot of searching going on. … We went pretty deep into the story and deep into the themes of the story based on who we are, where we were born, and at these advanced ages, so a lot of the themes are biologically on the horizon,' describes the musician and lyricist.
SEE Julia Knitel describes tackling triple roles in 'Dead Outlaw' and performing 'a perfect musical theater song' in the 'weirdest' show
Dead Outlaw reunited much of the Tony-winning creative team behind The Band's Visit, which is one of the most awarded musicals in the honor's history, taking home 10 trophies. Librettist Itamar Moses, who was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama this year for his off-Broadway play The Ally, notes how the process of creating this musical mirrored that earlier work because he, Yazbek, and director David Cromer 'trust one another and have similar tastes.' Even so, he describes how the two musicals could not be more different: 'They're almost exact opposites. The Band's Visit takes place over one night, and Dead Outlaw covers a hundred years. The Band's Visit's all about these quiet, dialogue, spare scenes and people sitting ... and here, we're barreling ahead like a rock concert and like a freight train through all of this time."
Andrew Durand, who earned his first Tony nomination for playing the title character, loves the range of the show. 'You get these explosive moments — there are big, exciting, theatrical moments – and then you zero in on these little, intimate, almost play-like moments.' One of those explosive moments is the song 'Killed a Man in Maine,' in which Elmer drunkenly weaves a tall tale about committing a murder, though there is no evidence that the real McCurdy ever did. 'I've really come to love that number, because it used to scare the hell out of me. I would do it and I would blow out all my gas on that number and then I'd have the rest of a show to do. … I've figured out how to incorporate it into the rest of the show.'
For Featured Actress nominee Julia Knitel, the Tony Awards embrace of Dead Outlaw echoes what she's finding amongst audiences every night. 'From the time of our first performance, the audiences have really been on board. New York audiences like weird. We forget that it's okay to be different. … It's refreshing to have something that you've never seen before. New York audiences are smart, and I think as soon as they walk in, they realize this is not your typical musical.'
Dead Outlaw earned seven Tony Award nominations, the second-most of any musical this year behind Buena Vista Social Club, Death Becomes Her, and Maybe Happy Ending, all at 10. In Gold Derby's current odds, Dead Outlaw ranks in second place for Best Musical and second place for Best Original Score, which would mark Yazbek's second victory. Moses has a commanding lead in the Best Musical Book category, which would be his second victory out of two nominations. Director Cromer and featured actor Jeb Brown both rank third in their respective categories, while Knitel ranks fourth and Durand fifth.
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