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In Dead Outlaw, Elmer McCurdy Gets One More Turn in the Spotlight
An antihero takes an exceptionally long, exceptionally strange, exceptionally American voyage through the West.
That Dead Outlaw so neatly reflects the zeitgeist as it transfers uptown is representative of the way David Yazbek, Erik Della Penna, and Itamar Moses’s deceptively small-scale musical follows the stream of the hyperspecific into deep and vast currents in the American psyche. During that cross-country race, for instance, we spend time with Andy Payne (Trent Saunders, with a powerful voice that charges the whole theater with electricity), a Cherokee farmer and amateur runner who manages to win the thing and pay off his family debts. You’d miss the inky cloak of Heather Gilbert’s chiaroscuro lighting, though, and the way that Arnulfo Maldonado’s set shuffles that container with the band around the stage, revealing a Hudson River School-esque landscape painted on the back walls.
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