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STANDARD DEVIATIONS: THIS IS NOT A FILM

Even house arrest and potential imprisonment cannot stop Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi from telling cinematic stories

THIS IS NOT A FILM (IN FILM NIST) (Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, 2011)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Monday, March 25, 7:00
Series runs March 22-28
718-636-4100
canopycanopycanopy.com
www.bam.org

“You call this a film?” Jafar Panahi asks rhetorically about halfway through the revealing 2011 documentary This Is Not a Film, screening March 25 at 7:00 at BAM as part of “Triple Canopy Presents: Standard Deviations,” a weeklong festival, curated by Yasmina Price, consisting of works that challenge cinematic norms in visual and narrative storytelling. “Standard Deviations” opens March 22 with Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess and concludes March 28 with Ephraim Asili’s “Multisensory Alchemies: Daïchi Saïto + Konjur Collective,” featuring films accompanied by live music, followed by a Q&A. Other highlights are Stephanie Rothman’s The Student Nurses, William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, and Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento’s The Wandering Soap Opera.

After several arrests beginning in July 2009 for supporting the opposition party, highly influential and respected Iranian filmmaker Panahi (Crimson Gold, Offside) was convicted in December 2010 for “assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic.” Although facing a six-year prison sentence and twenty-year ban on making or writing any kind of movie, Panahi is a born storyteller, so he can’t stop himself, no matter the risks. Under house arrest, Panahi has his friend, fellow director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (Lady of the Roses), film him with a handheld DV camera over ten days as Panahi plans out his next movie, speaks with his lawyer, lets his pet iguana climb over him, and is asked to watch a neighbor’s dog, taking viewers “behind the scenes of Iranian filmmakers not making films.” Panahi even pulls out his iPhone to take additional video, photographing New Year’s fireworks that sound suspiciously like a military attack. Panahi is calm throughout, never panicking (although he clearly does not want to take care of the barking dog) and not complaining about his situation, which becomes especially poignant as he watches news reports on the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan.

“But you can’t make a film now anyhow, can you?” Mirtahmasb — who will later be arrested and imprisoned as well — asks at one point. “So what I can’t make a film?” Panahi responds. “That means I ask you to take a film of me? Do you think it will turn into some major work of art?” This Is Not a Film, which was smuggled out of Iran in a USB drive hidden in a birthday cake so it could be shown at Cannes, is indeed a major work of art, an important document of government repression of free speech as well as a fascinating examination of one man’s intense dedication to his art and the creative process. Shortlisted for the Best Documentary Academy Award, This Is Not a Film is a mesmerizing experience from a genius who has since gifted the world with Closed Curtain, Taxi, Three Faces, and No Bears, defying the government while constantly looking over his shoulder.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE NOTEBOOK: THE MUSICAL

Teens Allie (Jordan Tyson) and Noah (John Cardoza) fall in love in The Notebook (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

THE NOTEBOOK
Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre
236 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 7, $74-$298
notebookmusical.com

“I don’t think there was any way I could have imagined that it would become as successful as it did. It’s like catching lightning in a bottle,” former pharmaceutical salesman Nicholas Sparks told Show Daily about his blockbuster debut novel, 1996’s The Notebook, which was lifted out of a literary agency slush pile. The tearjerker spent more than a year on the bestseller list, though it never reached number one. It caught lightning in a bottle again in 2004, when it was adapted into a hugely successful film, directed by Nick Cassavetes and starring Ryan Gosling, James Garner, Rachel McAdams, Gena Rowlands (Nick’s mom), Joan Allen, James Marsden, and Sam Shepard.

The novel and film had plenty of naysayers, decrying it as sentimental claptrap; the movie is certified Rotten on Rotten Tomatoes, but it won eight Teen Choice Awards as well as Best Kiss at the MTV Movie Awards. It knows its audience. (For the record, I have not read the book nor seen the film.)

The third time is unlikely to be the charm for the haters out there, as The Notebook is now a Broadway musical, running at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre through July 7. If this iteration is a hit, it won’t be because of quality, which it is sadly lacking.

The show features underwhelming music and lyrics by American singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson and a tepid book by Bekah Brunstetter, who has written such plays as The Cake and Oohrah! and was a writer, story editor, and Emmy-nominated producer on This Is Us. Incorporating elements from both the novel and the film, the narrative moves between 1967, 1977, and 2021 in an unnamed mid-Atlantic town.

John Cardoza, Dorian Harewood, and Ryan Vasquez portray the same character at three different times in The Notebook (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

It opens with an older man watching two teenagers meet and fall instantly in love. “Time to get up, time to get up now / And let the bones crack into place / I look in the mirror, I see an old man / But in my eyes, a young man’s face,” the old man sings. “Time, time time time / It never was mine, / mine mine mine / But you know what is? / Love, hope, breath, and dreams / As cliché as that seems.” Cliché becomes a kind of leitmotif throughout the show’s 140 minutes (with intermission).

In 2021, Noah (Dorian Harewood) is in an extended caregiving facility reading from a handwritten notebook to Allie (Maryann Plunkett), whose dementia is worsening. As he reads, scenes from the notebook are acted out onstage by the teenage Allie (Jordan Tyson) and Noah (John Cardoza) in 1967 and the twentysomething Allie (Joy Woods) and Noah (Ryan Vasquez) ten years later.

The plot is the classic hardworking tough guy meets rich girl, rich girl’s parents (Andréa Burns and Dorcas Leung) break them apart, boy joins the army with his best friend (Carson Stewart), girl finds a respectable lawyer (Chase Del Rey) to marry, boy and girl imagine what might have happened had they stayed together. The older Noah believes that by telling the story to Allie over and over again, it might help her regain at least some of her memories, while the nurse (Burns) insists Noah follows the rules and his physical therapist (Stewart) tries to get him to get treatment for his ailing knee, but Noah has more important things on his mind.

The narrative goes back and forth in time, occasionally with some Allies and Noahs watching the others. Diverse, race-blind casting is one of the best things to happen to Broadway in recent years, but The Notebook takes it to new, confusing levels. The three Noahs and the three Allies are different sizes, different heights, and different colors. Tyson and Cardoza lack the necessary chemistry to kick things off; Woods and Vasquez have more passion, but the story keeps their characters apart for too long. By the time you figure out what is happening with the older Noah and Allie, it’s too late, although there are a few touching moments between them near the end, and the handling of the painting is the most successful part of the show.

Maryann Plunkett, Joy Woods, and Jordan Tyson portray the same character at three different times in The Notebook (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Codirectors Michael Greif (Dear Evan Hansen, Next to Normal) and Schele Williams (Aida, The Wiz) are unable to rein in the overall befuddlement on David Zinn and Brett J. Banakis’s rustic set, which switches from a nursing home to a historic house that needs significant work; there’s also a pool of water in the front of the stage where Allie and Noah swim and play. When boredom sets in, you can check out Ben Stanton’s lighting design, which features dozens of narrow, cylindrical, fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling with bulbs at the bottom that make them look like big pens (that one might, say, use to write in a notebook?). The lighting also casts a cool shimmer when it focuses on the pool.

The score, with arrangements by Michaelson and music supervisor Carmel Dean and orchestrations by Dean and John Clancy, can’t keep pace with the narrative, slowing it down dramatically. When teenage Allie asks teenage Noah if he has a pen and he says, “Why would I have a pen?,” I pointed up at the lights. When Middle Noah sings, “Leave the Light On,” I suddenly felt as if I were in a Motel 6 advertisement. And when the young Allie and Noah sing about his chest hair — twice — but Cardoza doesn’t have any, I wondered if it was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek joke. (If it was, it didn’t draw laughs.)

It’s a treat to see Tony winner Plunkett (Agnes of God, Me and My Gal) and Emmy nominee and NAACP Image Award winner Harewood (Streamers, Jesus Christ Superstar), and Woods (Six, Little Shop of Horrors) nearly steals the show with her solo turn in “My Days”; when she sings, “Where am I going,” I could only think that she has a big future ahead of her.

The musical probably has a big future ahead of itself too, naysayers be damned.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE EFFECT

Tristan (Paapa Essiedu) and Connie (Taylor Russell) are part of a pharmaceutical experiment in The Effect (photo by Marc Brenner)

THE EFFECT
The Griffin Theater at the Shed
The Bloomberg Building at Hudson Yards
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 31, $109-$159
646-455-3494
theshed.org

British director Jamie Lloyd has dazzled New York audiences the last five years with stunning revivals of Cyrano de Bergerac at BAM and A Doll’s House and Betrayal on Broadway, starring such big names as James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, and Tom Hiddleston. His stripped-down versions illuminate the story, giving the actors plenty of room to do what they do best.

Lloyd is now back with Lucy Prebble’s The Effect, but this time his spare staging, though electrifying, is not quite able to cover up the flaws in the repetitive and confusing plot.

The play debuted at the National Theatre in 2012 with Billie Piper and had its New York premiere at the Barrow Street Theatre in 2016. This revival, running at the Shed’s Griffin Theater through March 31, features a narrow rectangular video platform in the center; the audience sits on opposite sides, essentially looking at one another, implicating everyone in the proceedings. The show takes place in a pharmaceutical testing facility where Tristan Frey (Paapa Essiedu) and Connie Hall (Taylor Russell) are the subjects in a four-week study of a new antidepressant; they have agreed to surrender their phones, be honest about what they’re feeling, and abstain from sex.

They are being observed by Dr. Lorna James (Michele Austin), who sits at one end; her ambitious colleague, Dr. Toby Sealey (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), sits at the other. The subjects are dressed all in white, the doctors all in black. Above them is an exposed flown lighting truss; there are speakers up high as well as behind the two doctors. A distant, ominous drone can be heard throughout the play’s hundred minutes. When the audience first enters the theater, loud EDM is blasting, with smoke floating across the space, as if we’re at a club. The set and costumes are by Soutra Gilmour, with lighting by Jon Clark, music composition by Michael “Mikey J” Asante, sound by George Dennis, and movement direction by Sarah Golding and Yukiko Masui of the SAY dance company.

“Have you ever suffered from depression?” Dr. James asks Connie, who responds, “No. I’ve felt depressed. But. . . . What I mean is, I’ve been sad. . . . Just. I wouldn’t say, oh I’m depressed. Or I would, but just meaning sad. You know cos. That’s. I’m not. So.” The difference between depression and sadness is key to the plot, as Connie and Tristan receive doses of agent RLU37 (or a placebo) and Dr. James measures their heart rate, pupil dilation, electro-dermal response, and blood.

Squares and rectangles light up on the platform, trying to contain Tristan and Connie, but the more time they spend together, the more they want to break the rules, especially Tristan, who has gone through previous drug trials and can’t stop flirting with Connie. Early on, they participate in a test with words and colors that flash on the floor of the platform in such a way that the audience can take the test as well, creating another bond. It could be us onstage, dealing with sadness and depression.

Meanwhile, it becomes apparent that Dr. James and Dr. Sealey have some kind of history that could impact their objectivity as Tristan and Connie try to figure out what is real and what is the result of a chemical reaction. “I can tell the difference between who I am and a side effect,” Tristan says. “With respect, Tristan, no you definitely can’t,” Connie answers.

The Effect is mesmerizing to watch; there is always something going on that will captivate your attention, from pounding beats and flashing lights to billowing smoke and unexpected movement. Austin (The Hunt, Cyrano de Bergerac), Holdbrook-Smith (Tina Turner: The Musical, The Low Road), Essiedu (The Moment Before I Am Powerful, The Convert), and Russell (Bones and All, Waves), in her theatrical debut, are a formidable ensemble, but the narrative feels repetitive in the second half, revisiting ideas it has already covered.

Prebble (A Very Expensive Poison, The Sugar Syndrome), who was a writer and Emmy-winning producer on Succession and the creator of the hilariously cringy show I Hate Suzie, which starred Piper as a former child star enveloped in a sex scandal as an adult, raises fascinating questions about fantasy and reality; personal identity and drug-manufactured social behavior; and humanity’s growing dependence on pharmaceuticals, even as the chemistry between the characters eventually hits a wall.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

FOREVER YOUNG: AMERICAN HONEY

Sasha Lane makes a compelling debut in Andrea Arnold’s extraordinary American Honey

AMERICAN HONEY (Andrea Arnold, 2016)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Friday, March 15, 5:30
Festival runs March 1-24
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
www.americanhoney-movie.com

Metrograph continues its “Forever Young” series with Andrea Arnold’s fourth feature film, an exhilarating and daring whirlwind epic about marginalized college-age youth trying to make a go of it in contemporary America. In American Honey, her third Grand Jury Prize winner at Cannes (following Fish Tank and Red Road), Arnold goes on the road with the 071 mag crew, a group of itinerant high school dropouts and runaways who cross middle America in a van, selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. As in all of her films, Arnold casts many nonprofessional actors, including Sasha Lane, who she discovered on a Florida beach during spring break. Lane makes a dazzling debut as Star, a young woman in an extremely dysfunctional family who is captivated by Jake (Shia LaBeouf) and his friends’ antics in a Walmart. Lured in by Jake’s seductive charm, she runs away from home and joins the ragtag bunch of more than a dozen lost souls who have formed a kind of unique family of their own. Led by the tough Krystal (Riley Keough) and the bold Jake, the mag crew spends its days trying to sell subscriptions for cash, making their way through various communities in Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and North Dakota. At night they stay at motels and party all night long, drinking, dancing, singing, and goofing around.

The tight-knit group consists of Shaunte (Shawna Rae Moseley, the real-life owner of the mag crew’s pit bull), Pagan (Arielle Holmes, who detailed her own troubles in Heaven Knows What), Katness (former exotic dancer Crystal B. Ice), QT (Verronikah Ezell, who is raising a daughter with her wife), Billy (singer-songwriter Chad McKenzie Cox), Austin (former high school football player Garry Howell), Sean (construction worker Kenneth Kory Tucker, who is dating Moseley), JJ (Raymond Coalson), Kalium (skateboarder Isaiah Stone), Runt (Dakota Powers), Corey (McCaul Lombardi), and Chris (Christopher David Wright), most of whom revel in their freedom, unworried about parents, the government, or other authority figures. Meanwhile, Krystal is a kind of modern-day Fagin, threatening to kick out poor performers, forcing those with the lowest sales figures into brutal fistfights with each other. The street-smart but sensitive Star does what she needs to survive, including getting into cars and trucks with men who have something more than magazines on their mind, although she is disturbed by Jake’s lies and how he and others steal from customers. The film is a breathtaking coming-of-age tale not just for Star but for this entire generation of kids who have been shut out of mainstream society, for whatever reason, but are not giving up on their dreams.

Jake (Shia LaBeouf) and Star (Sasha Lane) encounter some major trouble in exhilarating road-trip movie

Inspired by a 2007 New York Times article by Ian Urbina that detailed the very real and harsh story of mag crews, Arnold traveled across parts of America by herself in researching the film, then had members of the cast actually try to sell magazine subscriptions in Kansas City. The film was shot in fifty-six days as the cast and a limited crew traveled in vans and stayed in motels. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who has photographed all four of Arnold’s feature films (as well as Philomena and several documentaries), does a superb job of capturing the open road, the Bible Belt neighborhoods, and the wild abandon and exciting energy exhibited by the mag crew, who were allowed to develop their characters and improvise. The soundtrack is critical to the film, and it boasts a wide variety of music, with songs by E-40, the Raveonettes, Ciara featuring Ludacris, Bruce Springsteen, Jeremih, Mazzy Star, Carnage, Razzy Bailey, Kevin Gates, Quigley, MadeinTYO, Lady Antebellum, and others. The actors, most of whom are making their first cinematic appearances, form a tight-knit family that is thrilling to watch develop. LaBeouf (Transformers, Nymphomaniac) gives one of his best performances as the hard-to-figure-out Jake, while Lane, who moved to Los Angeles to continue acting, is mesmerizing as Star, whose problems are emblematic of so much of what is wrong in today’s society. The film is very much about the hopes and dreams of this lost generation — and how the American dream has failed them. A 162-minute film about disaffected youth selling magazine subscriptions in the twenty-first century might not sound like a slam dunk, but Arnold, in her first film made in the States, has created an unforgettable vision of the country today. “We explore, like, America; we party. Come with us,” Jake tells Sasha early on. We’re glad we went along for the ride too; so will you.

American Honey opened on September 30, 2016, at the Landmark Sunshine and Loews Lincoln Square, the same day that the New York Film Festival began. Curiously, Arnold was the inaugural 2013 filmmaker in residence at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the host of the festival, but American Honey was not selected for the fifty-fourth annual event. Among the upcoming “Forever Young” screenings are Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and John Waters’s Cry-Baby.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

FIRST LOOK 2024: SOLARIS MON AMOUR / HANDFUL OF DIRT

Kuba Mikurda’s Solaris mon amour explores inner and outer space using found footage

SOLARIS MON AMOUR (Kuba Mikurda, 2023) / HANDFUL OF DIRT (GARSTKA ZIEMI) (Izabela Zubrycka, 2023)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, March 15, $15, 6:30
Series runs March 13-17, individual screenings $15, Weekend Pass $60, All-Festival Pass $120
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Despite its tantalizing title, Kuba Mikurda’s Solaris Mon Amour is not an experimental film lover’s fantasy mashup of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour. Instead, it’s a fascinating journey into grief and trauma, dreams and memory, using found scientific footage to create a compelling and haunting cinematic experience.

Mikurda goes back to Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris, which the Polish writer and philosopher began writing in 1959, the year that Hiroshima mon amour was released. The latter is about an actress and an architect who have a torrid affair in one of the two cities that the United States dropped the atomic bomb on in 1945; the former imagines a planet where an astronaut encounters what appears to be his dead wife, among other strange things.

Mikurda and editor Laura Pawela piece together their forty-seven-minute black-and-white story out of excerpts from more than seventy films in the WFO archives at the Educational Film Studio in Lodz made between 1952 and 1982, including Earth Our Planet, Life of the Stars, Radiographic Study of Metals, The World of Mold, Injections, Jellyfish, Plasma Torch, ABC of Cosmonautics, and She Put Down Foots Filled the Ground, accompanied by Marcin Lenarczyk’s sci-fi soundtrack. The images range from the sun, moon, and stars to technical equipment, brain tissue, blood molecules, microorganisms, astronaut training, flames, random numbers, and extreme close-ups of unidentified people, along with audio clips from Jozef Grotowski’s 1962 and 1970 radio adaptations of Solaris.

“It was the first and only totally incomprehensible case in my life,” Kris Kelvin says. “I’m flying to Solaris because I think this is about ourselves, about the limits of human cognition.”

The director was inspired by Agnieszka Gajewska’s books Holocaust and the Stars: The Past in the Prose of Stanisław Lem and Stanislaw Lem: Exiled from the High Castle, in addition to such films as Chris Marker’s La Jetée, Guy Maddin’s The Green Fog, and György Palfi’s Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen; it also made me think of Bill Morrison’s Decasia, with its decaying film stock.

Solaris Mon Amour opens with a shot of a camera lens facing slightly off center, tracking a man checking the grassy ground in a field and digging into the earth. “How exhausting. Need to wake up,” a voiceover says. Mikurda then cuts to a view of the universe and, later, microscopic images, equating the camera and the microscope, two instruments humans employ to learn more about the world and our place in the universe. Mikurda (Love Express: The Disappearance of Walerian Borowczyk, Escape to the Silver Globe) crafts it all into a hypnotic audiovisual mystery that will keep echoing in your mind long after it’s over.

Izabela Zubrycka’s Handful of Dirt follows a rural Polish funeral singer and her gravedigger son

Solaris Mon Amour is being shown March 15 at 6:30 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s thirteenth annual First Look festival, running March 13–17, comprising more than two dozen events, from North American film premieres to screenplay readings, workshops, and an art reception. Mikurda’s film will be preceded by Izabela Zubrycka’s student documentary Handful of Dirt (Garstka Ziemi), which also explores such themes as grief and loss. Zubrycka focuses on Halina Waszkiewicz, one of the last funeral singers in Podlasie, Poland, and her son, gravedigger Andrzej Wójcik. The thirteen-minute short echoes Solaris Mon Amour in its own way, with shots of the sun, sky, and moon, Wójcik digging into the earth, moments of silence, extreme close-ups, and talk of time, dreams, sleep, and death.

Writer-director Zubrycka, cinematographer Stefan Żółtowski, editor Anna Adamowicz, and sound recordist Maciej Tobera follow Andrzej as he prepares the graves and Halina joins a group of singers in black who will help the deceased cross over through song. “I wasn’t afraid and I’m not afraid of the dead,” Halina says. “What is death?”

Mikurda and Zubrycka will be at the screening at MoMI’s Redstone Theater to discuss their work. First Look kicks off March 13 with Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez’s Sujo and Charlie Shackleton’s short Lateral and continues with such films as Mariam Chachia and Nik Voigt’s Magic Mountain, Robert Kolodny’s The Featherweight, and Lois Patiño’s Samsara.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

CASTING

CASTING
Gymnopedie
1139 Bushwick Ave.
March 15-17, $23.18
castinginnyc.eventbrite.com
gymnopedie.nyc

Winner of the Los Angeles Immersive Invitational Grand Prize, Koryn Wicks’s Casting is making its New York City debut March 15-17 at Gymnopedie in Bushwick. Most performers dread the audition process, but in this case up to twelve audience members at a time will participate, trying to land a big role. The thirty-minute work was created by Wicks (I love you so much, SQUEEZE ME TO DEATH; To Die in the Valley I’ve Loved) and a team of collaborators that includes writer Sam Alper, singer-songwriter Hanah Davenport, lighting and video designer and dancer Morgan Embry, sound designer and composer Alex Lough, and actors Audrey Rachelle and Jonathan Gordon. Tickets are $23.18 for your chance to be the star of the show.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

DEAD OUTLAW

Elmer J. McCurdy (Andrew Durand) faces an unusual reckoning in Dead Outlaw (photo by Matthew Murphy)

DEAD OUTLAW
Audible Theater’s Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane between Sixth Ave. and MacDougal St.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 7, $87-$126
www.audible.com

In 1976, while setting up to shoot an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, crew members discovered a body hanging in a tree. They could not rebuild him; he was not going to be another bionic man.

The true story of that mummified creature is told in Dead Outlaw, making its world premiere at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre through April 7. It’s from the same team that collaborated on the Tony-winning The Band’s Visit, but it’s unlikely to have the same impact and get as many visits.

Elmer McCurdy was born in 1880 in Searsmont, Maine; as dysfunctional as the first part of his life was, what happened to him afterward was an even stranger (mis)adventure.

Following a difficult childhood, Elmer (Andrew Durand) hops a train, searching for something else. He travels to Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, picking up odd jobs, drinking too much, shacking up with the lovely Maggie (Julia Knitel), serving in the military, and, slowly but surely, becoming a hapless outlaw. He joins up with the Jarrett brothers, led by Walter (Jeb Brown), but he fails miserably at his responsibility, breaking into safes.

When he is eventually killed at the age of thirty-one, no one in his family claims his body. Johnson (Eddie Cooper), the local coroner, uses arsenic when embalming the corpse in order to preserve it until someone shows up to take Elmer, but soon he is charging admission for people to gawk at the body, kicking off a whole new career for the dead outlaw, culminating in a second autopsy in 1976 by Dr. Thomas Noguchi (Thom Sesma), the LA medical examiner who handled such famous deaths as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Natalie Wood.

Coroners have questions about a strange body in Audible world premiere (photo by Matthew Murphy)

The strange tale is narrated by the bandleader (Brown), who plays guitar and trades lead vocals with Erik Della Penna, who plays guitar, lap steel, and banjo. The rest of the excellent band consists of music conductor Rebekah Bruce on keyboards, Hank on electric guitar, Chris Smylie on bass, and Spencer Cohen on drums, performing in a honky tonk shack that rolls around the stage with the help of multiple people. Arnulfo Maldonado’s set also features painted Western murals on the back wall and stanchions to the left and right, while Sarah Laux’s period costumes are exemplary.

The music and lyrics are by multiple Tony winner David Yazbek (Tootsie, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), who has been haunted by the life and death of McCurdy for thirty years, and Della Penna (Toby and the Big Top), with a book by Tony winner Itamar Moses (The Ally, Bach at Leipzig) and direction by Tony winner David Cromer (Our Town, Uncle Vanya).

The first part of the play is a jaunty frolic, with rocking country tunes and Brown serving as a terrific master of ceremonies. The show opens with the rollicking “Dead,” in which Brown and Della Penna proclaim, “You came with noth’n, / you’ll leave here just the same,” rattling off the names of deceased people, from John Gotti, John Dillinger, Babe Ruth, Honoré de Balzac, Bert Convy, and Anne Frank to, in a later reprise, several well-known figures who are still alive. Each chorus about the dead ends, “And so are you,” a reminder that no one is immune from eventually leaving this mortal coil.

In “Normal People,” Erik and Elmer explain, “Don’t know what I want to be / Just as long as it ain’t me, / Like normal people,” emphasizing Elmer’s relatable lack of identity. In “Nobody Knows Your Name,” Elmer opines, “It isn’t right, it isn’t fair / It’s like you’re born but you’re not anywhere / And once you’re gone / It’s just the same / When nobody knows / Nobody knows your name.”

In Elmer’s case, it’s not just the same once he’s gone, as evidenced by Johnson’s statement that “death is a business.” But from that point on, as Elmer’s death refuses to die, the musical unravels like a mummy falling apart at the seams. The music shifts genres as Elmer’s corpse makes the rounds, losing the flow of the narrative, which also gets caught up in too many details. Instead of having individual songs for so many stops on Elmer’s body’s journey, it might have been better to have condensed them into one or two numbers. “Andy Payne,” for example, about a Cherokee farmer (Trent Saunders) running a race, might be electrifying on its own but here feels like it belongs in a different show. In addition, some of the continuity is lost as the audience watches actors and stagehands move the heavy set, which happens much more in the second half of the hundred-minute work.

Jeb Brown is a standout as the master of ceremonies in Dead Outlaw (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Durand (Shucked, Head Over Heels) is much braver than Elmer, especially as he spends a substantial portion of the show standing up in a coffin. Brown (Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, Becomes a Woman) is the heart and soul of Dead Outlaw, charming and amiable as both the bandleader and Jarrett. Cooper (Parade, Assassins), Knitel (Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, Bye Bye Birdie), Ken Marks (Hindle Wakes, Airline Highway), Dashiell Eaves (Coram Boy, Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine), Saunders (Hadestown, Aladdin), and Sesma (Arden of Faversham, A Man of No Importance) provide solid support in multiple roles, although it can get confusing who’s who.

Elmer McCurdy had a pathetic life, mostly of his own doing, and an even more pathetic death, which he had nothing to do with. His bizarre story deserves to be more well known, especially now, in a time when people are encouraged to take control of their personal narrative and define who they are. If only Dead Outlaw hadn’t veered off course, losing focus on how it was defining itself.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]