The real history behind 'Dead Outlaw' on Broadway
The award-winning new musical from the creators of The Band's Visit dramatizes the true story of a bandit who became more famous in death than in life.
Death becomes him. Elmer McCurdy, that is. In the tangy, twangy, and darkly amusing new Broadway musical Dead Outlaw, he’s the titular bandit whose life became exponentially more fascinating after his death.
McCurdy got a postmortem surge of fame thanks to his mummified corpse, as chronicled in the show. Before finally being buried in the 1970s, McCurdy’s preserved remains were displayed at a funeral parlor, in sideshows, and in a California funhouse. You gotta have a gimmick, as another musical, Gypsy, says.
It all adds up to a story that sings about fame and the macabre side of popular entertainment. An onstage band playing honkytonk, blues, and country tunes adds heaps to the story by book writer Itamar Moses and songwriters David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna. Following its award-winning Off-Broadway run in 2024, Dead Outlaw comes to Broadway's Longacre Theatre with the downtown cast intact under the direction of David Cromer (a Tony Award winner for The Band’s Visit alongside Moses and Yazbek).
As Dead Outlaw comes out shootin’, learn more about the real history that inspired the show.
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The Wild West and 1800s outlaw culture
Born in Maine in 1880, McCurdy grew up far away from the American frontier. But the Wild West — and its gun-toting gangs — loomed large in his mind from a distance. Early on in the musical, a young and unruly McCurdy declares: “I’m the outlaw Jesse James.” James, of course, was an infamous criminal from Missouri born in 1847, whose life of committing bank and train robberies ended with his killing in 1882.
Like his outlaw hero, McCurdy met his fate following a career of lawlessness. His death from a bullet wound to the gut in 1911 wasn’t the end of his story, but the beginning of a strange second chapter in the sideshow circuit.
The 1900s sideshow circuit
In the early 20th century, the American sideshow circuit flourished, offering bizarre attractions to draw crowds. Traveling carnivals featured "freak shows" with human oddities. These spectacles captivated audiences with their shock value, exploiting curiosity and fascination with the oddball and abnormal: the strongman, the alligator girl, the tattooed lady.
Sideshow promoters used sensationalized advertising to lure people in, creating a sense of mystery and intrigue around the performers. McCurdy’s body, preserved with arsenic, became a star attraction for audiences bent on seeing a bandit in the flesh — or, in this case, as a mummy. Various sideshows advertised him as "The Oklahoma Outlaw," "The Outlaw Who Would Never Be Captured Alive," "The Bandit Who Wouldn't Give Up," "The Mystery Man of Many Aliases," and simply "The Embalmed Bandit."
He first was put on display at a mortuary and then at the Great Patterson Traveling Carnival. “There’s something about a mummy that really stirs the soul,” sings one of the carnival's impresarios in Dead Outlaw.
McCurdy's body ended up being used in films and as a prop in a Los Angeles amusement park ride — for which he was spray-painted red — before finally being put to rest.
Historical figures in Dead Outlaw
During Dead Outlaw, a bandleader acts like a narrator to keep the audience on the same page as the story moves back and forth between the late 1800s and the 1970s. The bandleader is an invented character, but multiple real people are dramatized in the musical.
Elmer McCurdy
In large part, the musical faithfully recounts McCurdy’s unconventional upbringing. Born in Maine to the unmarried Sadie McCurdy in 1880, he was adopted and raised by her brother George and his wife Helen. McCurdy’s life eventually led him west to Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma.
He traded plumbing, odd jobs, and an honest day's work for robbing trains. His knowledge of nitroglycerin for demolition, honed from being in the Army, should have come in handy for safecracking. But he was lousy at figuring out how much nitro to use, ultimately blowing vaults — and their loot — to smithereens.
McCurdy was shot to death in Oklahoma in 1911 by a posse of three sheriffs in the aftermath of a failed train robbery. The bungling bandit got a second life in entertainment by way of his lucrative corpse.
Walter Jarrett and the Jarrett brothers
McCurdy fell in with a gang composed of Walter Jarrett and his five brothers for part of his life of crime. Dead Outlaw dramatizes McCurdy and Jarrett meeting in a jail cell, where Jarrett recruits McCurdy to join their bank-robbing exploits. (They later attempt to break with him after some nitroglycerin fumbles and a failed train-robbing attempt. In real life, McCurdy infamously mistook a passenger train for one carrying $400,000, ending up with a mere $46 in stolen goods instead.)
In the musical, Jarrett ropes McCurdy in by telling him he needs to make a decision about “whether you wanna be remembered.”
Andy Payne
Oklahoma-born Andy Payne is the winner of a cross-country race shadowed by a traveling sideshow featuring McCurdy. Payne gets a self-titled song in the Dead Outlaw musical, which imagines what might have happened if Payne visited the sideshow and saw the corpse.
Thomas Noguchi
Thomas Noguchi is the Los Angeles coroner who headed up the autopsy and burial of McCurdy’s body in 1976. "Here in Los Angeles County we get more than our fair share of famous corpses," Noguchi tells the audience in Dead Outlaw, launching into the song "Up to the Stars" in which he gleefully describes them.
More real-life Dead Outlaw characters
Dead Outlaw's minor characters include a roundup of actual people who put McCurdy’s corpse on view for paying audiences. They include undertaker Joseph L. Johnson, the first person to display the body for money at his office; James and Charles Patterson, who posed as McCurdy's brothers so they could claim his body for their self-titled carnival; Louis Sonney, who ran a mobile museum of crime; and exploitation filmmaker Dwain Esper, who featured McCurdy's body in promo materials for his 1933 film Narcotic!
By the time Dead Outlaw is over — the show runs 100 minutes without intermission — audiences will remember him for life.
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Photo credit: Dead Outlaw off Broadway. (Photos by Matthew Murphy)
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