When composer David Yazbek approached his “Band’s Visit” partner David Cromer in 2019 to direct “Dead Outlaw,” a high-energy song cycle that was evolving into a musical, Cromer wasn’t sure it was a good fit.
“One of the first things he said was, ‘I don’t tend to go out just to listen to music. I want more than that,” said Yazbek, who envisioned a show with an on-stage band, interstitial narration and minimal scenery. “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 nailed down the great rock band part.”
Unlike “The Band’s Visit,” the gently comedic, Tony-winning tale of an Egyptian band stranded in an Israeli town set in one night, “Dead Outlaw” is a thrilling ride for a tumultuous turn. -The outlaw of the 20th century, whose body becomes a touring, decades-long sideshow exhibited across the country.
It also happens to be true.
“It’s what I call 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, scheduled to run through April 14 at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, traces the ineffective, boozy career and subsequent death, in a 1911 shootout, of Elmer McCurdy, whose unwitting second act has inspired books. he plays and BBC documentary.
Yazbek, who designed the musical, first heard the story three decades ago from a college friend whose mother had told him the story when Elmer’s arsenic-preserved body—dyed bright red and hanging from a noose— discovered during an amusement park ride in Southern California in 1976.
The body was assumed to be a mannequin – until the TV series “The Six Million Dollar Man” came to film an episode on the ride, and a crew member discovered otherwise.
“This is a man!” the horrified Teamster exclaims in “Dead outlaw.”
“I said, ‘I’ve got to do something with this,'” said Yazbek, who included newspaper articles about Elmer in pamphlets at the Bryant Park branch of the New York Public Library. “But I could never find a way in.”
In 2017, he and Della Penna, a longtime friend, began working on a country, rock and bluegrass song cycle, recording demos of numbers including “Dead,” the haunting song that showcases Elmer’s life of crime. “Normal”, about Elmer’s desire to put his grudge behind him and settle down with a local girl. and “Leave Me Be,” Elmer’s last words as he dies after being shot.
They enlisted Moses to write the book, which Yazbek said was initially a few lines of narration between numbers — just enough, he added, to get people from scene to scene.
In September 2021, accompanied by three other musicians, he and Della Penna performed the musical in progress at the Midtown cabaret venue 54 Below, with Yazbek reading Moses’ narrative additions.
“True crime is a genre that’s incredibly popular in the audio industry,” Navin, who now leads Audible’s North American creative development, said in a phone conversation. “And the storytelling is why this musical works so well in sound. It seemed like the perfect fit.”
He commissioned the team to finish writing the show, and in April 2022, Yazbek and Della Penna traveled to Guthrie, Okla., where Elmer is buried.
There, they interviewed a historian who had helped piece together the facts of Elmer’s story, saw the gun that killed Elmer at the Oklahoma Territorial Museum, and visited his hillside grave. They also drove to the nearby town of Pawhuska, where Elmer’s body was initially displayed at a funeral home.
Last summer, with the research complete, Audible committed to producing “Dead Outlaw” for the stage — and Cromer signed on to direct.
“One of the first images we had was people sitting around a fire,” Moses said of their vision for the show. “And we wanted to maintain that.”
Cromer also aimed for a minimalist production.
“The challenge became how little we could flesh it out,” he said of the staged, concert-style narrative, in which eight actors create several dozen characters among simple props — a table, a mummy — and occasionally climb a large unit of plywood castors. The five-piece band always remains the center of attention on stage.
Of course, for an audio musical, they would need to paint an entire western landscape aurally, which meant giving the audience some extra cues, Navin said.
“I was thinking: Is there information that the normal viewing audience should know?” Navin said, adding that she and the makers tweaked the script in preparation for this month’s studio recording of the show. “Do you have to say someone’s name again to know who just walked into the house?”
For Moses, the sonic musical form was vital to breaking a script he struggled with. Instead of first writing a script for the staged version and then retrofitting it for sound, he decided to write just one script: The version for a performance that one would only hear.
“It turns out it pretty much works that way,” he said, “except you need less explanation.”
This does not mean that the stage musical is a copy of the audio production. Theatergoers see a tender dance between Elmer (Andrew Durand) and the ghostly Maggie (Julia Knitel). Durant’s disturbing turn as Elmer’s corpse, propped upright in a casket, never quite blinks. and a macabre foam and papier-mâché mummy laid out on a coroner’s table.
One advantage of heavy storytelling, however, is that audiences can absorb the full force of each poignant detail, Moses said. “Looks like it’s time to remind you that this story is true,” bandleader Jeb Brown tells the audience during a particularly odd sequence.
And he’s right — mostly.
While a number of elements of Elmer’s life were condensed and merged for the scene — Elmer actually committed robberies with two different gangs, versus the one in “Dead Outlaw,” for example — all of the story’s big beats are true.
“There aren’t many inventions,” Moses said.
The most difficult challenge, he said, was perhaps the tone: striking the right balance between comedy, tragedy and a reminder that, ultimately, death comes for us all.
“The story is macabre and you need people laughing to get through it,” he said. “But you also don’t want to completely leave them out of wrestling with the darker themes of the show.”
In her New York Times review, Laura Collins-Hughes praised the musical for achieving this balance: “If it were to forget Elmer’s humanity—and it never does—it would lose its soul.”
“It’s a fun, interesting mirror of what these shows are doing,” added Moses. “You draw people in, you entertain them, but then you give them access to think about something deeper and more disturbing.”