Sarah on theater

I thought it was brilliant. The comparison with Operation Mincemeat is unavoidable and pretty darn interesting - two musicals that start from similar premises but make wildly different creative decisions from there. This one isn’t afraid to be brash or vulgar, but I think it really sets itself apart by leaning into an unusual structure and set of themes.

This is gonna get a little spoilery - sorry - not sure how else to talk about it.

Dead Outlaw is a one-act show that’s split into two halves; the “live” half is more or less a straight country-rock biomusical about an obscure outlaw, and the “dead” half becomes a series of concept vignettes about the people whose lives intersected with his embalmed corpse.

For the majority of the second half, Andrew Durand is literally just playing dead. It’s galling. It’s hilarious. I couldn’t believe they were doing this with their lead actor on Broadway. I was sitting there giggling just watching how incredibly still he was as other actors were rattling around or yelling at him.

It’s all pretty fundamentally disrespectful treatment of the dead, at least at face. But there’s a peculiar irony in that Elmer, the titular outlaw, finds a measure of dignity in death that he never had before. In life, he struggled to find his place; he was a lot of different things to different people, cycling through names and places and occupations and relationships, never really finding success at any of it, dogged by emotional troubles and substance abuse. He’s not even good at being an outlaw. It’s only in death that he - his body - is able to find anything resembling meaningful vocation. He becomes a confidante and a wordless advisor. He helps three or four people start successful businesses. He becomes infamous. People (and a place) finally claim him as one of their own. And eventually he is laid to rest (and now, of course, memorialized) in a slightly silly way that nevertheless is very protective of him.

It’s all played for laughs, and it’s hilarious. But I think there’s something really thoughtful at the heart of it. It begs interesting questions about whether the ways we spend our lives (and how we touch the lives of others) are a meaningful value-add over our essential human dignity. Are we our bodies, or do we just occupy them temporarily, and is it important for the preservation of that dignity to lay them to rest in the way that we do? (Contrast with, say, donating your body. Is this disrespectful?) How would someone so troubled in life react if they found out this would happen to them? Would they be at peace with it? Would they laugh?

I’m marking this as 4 stars because I’m an annoying little internet reviewer and I don’t think it’s 100% successful at executing these ideas. A few of the songs feel like filler, the ending is really abrupt, and I think aspects of the production could have been made more elaborate in the Broadway transfer. But, like, I loooove that we’re breaking some rules here (both in terms of the subject matter and what you’re supposed to do on a Broadway stage) and I do think there’s actually some interesting things bubbling under the surface. Super cool show.