‘Dead Outlaw’ Musical From ‘The Band’s Visit’ Team Sets Cast And Dates For Audible Theater Staging & Recording

Greg Evans
·3 min read
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Jeb Brown (City Center’s Pal Joey), Eddie Cooper (Parade), Andrew Durand (Shucked) and Dashiell Eaves (Broadway’s A Christmas Carol) are among the cast set for the upcoming Audible staging and recording of Dead Outlaw, a new musical from the team behind The Band’s Visit.

The musical, which tells the bizarre true story of a turn-of-the-20th-century outlaw whose corpse became a mummified side-show attraction for decades, will begin previews on Wednesday, February 28 ahead of a Sunday, March 10 opening night at Audible’s Off Broadway Minetta Lane Theatre.

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The limited engagement runs through Sunday, April 7, and will be recorded and released on Audible at a later date.

Also included in the principal cast will be Julia Knitel (Beautiful: The Carole King Musical), Ken Marks (Take Me Out), Trent Saunders (Hadestown) and Thom Sesma (City Center’s Oliver!).

As Deadline exclusively reported back in 2022, Dead Outlaw, conceived by David Yazbek, features music & lyrics by Yazbek & Erik Della Penna, and book by Itamar Moses, marking the first collaboration between Yasbek and Moses since their Tony-winning hit The Band’s Visit. Also on board: David Cromer, the Tony-winning director of The Band’s Visit currently repped on Broadway in Prayer for the French Republic.

The synopsis: Elmer McCurdy was an ambitious, turn-of-the-20th-century outlaw whose death at the hands of a Western posse ended a life of failed crime and alcoholism and began a brilliant career as a mummified side-show attraction that travelled the USA for decades. By the time this journey ended, his name had been forgotten and his desiccated body was hanging in a house-of-horrors ride at an amusement park in Southern California, spray-painted a day-glo orange. Then one day, a grip for The Six Million Dollar Man TV show jostled what he thought was ‘just a dummy’ and an arm fell off, revealing a human bone and beginning a hunt for the origins of this enigma.

The creative team for Dead Outlaw includes Ani Taj (movement direction), Dean Sharenow (music supervisor), Arnulfo Maldonado (scenic design), Sarah Laux (costume design), Heather Gilbert (lighting design), Kai Harada & Josh Millican (sound design), Isabella Curry (soundscape composition), Rebekah Bruce (music director), Erik Della Penna, and Dean Sharenow, & David Yazbek (orchestrations)

Yazbek has said he’s been haunted by this true story for thirty years and told his friend and bandmate Erik Della Penna the story, and as the two of them discussed why this tale of money, ambition, fame, memory and death was so compelling, they started writing songs for a stage-piece based on this odd life and these universal yet somehow very American themes. They approached Yazbek’s The Band’s Visit collaborators Itamar Moses and Cromer, who quickly became haunted and charmed by Elmer’s story.

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