Dead Outlaw (4*)

 

Trust me, you've never seen anything quite like Dead Outlaw: a lively musical about a desiccated corpse based on a story that brings to mind a Grateful Dead lyric:  what a long strange strip it's been.

Thanks to the preservative properties of arsenic, Elmer Curdy, a hapless train robber dead by the age of thirty, had a busy afterlife with spells of hibernation that lasted long enough to take him from pay-per-view in an unpaid funeral parlor to a carnival sideshow, a cross country marathon promoting Route 66 and Hollywood.  Only after his arm broke off in a California amusement park did he finally finding concrete-clad peace in the Oklahoma town where a posse had killed him--wait for it--66 years earlier!

Now, half a century later, Curdy, as embodied by the even-more-scary-alive-than-dead Andrew Durand, is still selling tickets, this time to a slightly more genteel audience in a Tony-nominated production on Broadway. If he's a little hard to warm up to in the lively first half, he brings down the house without moving a muscle in the second.  Band leader Jeb Brown narrates the unbelievable tale with an occasional reassurance, and a small cast, including several rollicking juke joint musicians, fills a dozen different supporting roles with uniform excellence.  Appropriate period costume and simple, evocative set design complete the trifecta of perfect production.  As Thomas Noguchi, Thom Sesma transforms the former "coroner to the stars" (I vividly recall his autopsy reports on Sharon Tate and Natalie Wood) into a Las Vegas crooner whose macabrely funny eleventh hour number increases the already abundant eclecticism of the score and lyrics by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna.

No show about a dead guy should be this exhilarating particularly one that may leave more sensitive audience members asking what form Elmer Curdy's relentless exploitation will take in the next century.  The sadly deceased, leaving no estate or heirs, already has more than paid his dues in two.