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‘Dead Outlaw’ Review: A Corpse Walks Off With A Glorious Broadway Season Send-Off

Deadline's review of Broadway's 'Dead Outlaw.'

With music and lyrics by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna and a book by Itamar Moses – Yazbek and Moses previously gave us the splendid The Band’s Visit – Dead Outlaw, acclaimed and award winning in previous stagings, tells the too strange-to-be-fiction tale of a real-life hapless, third-rate train robber of the late 19th/early 20th centuries who wasted a young life on booze, violence, failed love and unsuccessful crimes before being gut-shot at the age of 31. “Dead” – performed by the onstage rockabilly band led by actor Jeb Brown, who also takes part in the play proper – has the feel of a great barroom rouser infused with the caustic irreverence of punk singer Jim Carroll’s 1980 anthem “People Who Died.” Another song that, like “Dead” and “Normal” combines the macabre with something close to genuine sentiment, is a late-in-the-show comic number sung in the style of a swinging Sinatra crooner by none other than L.A.’s famous coroner Thomas Noguchi (Thom Sesma).

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