More on the Broadway Musical Season: Dead Outlaw, Buena Vista Social Club and Just in Time

Andrew Durand (left) and Company in Dead Outlaw. (Photo: Matthew Murphy.)

The general complaint about Broadway musicals in the twenty-first century is that too many of them recycle the plots of old movies. But ever since the advent of the sophisticated book musical with Show Boat in 1927, composers and librettists have looked to other media for source material, though during the golden age of American musicals they more often began as straight plays or novels. Did critics and aficionados bemoan the fact that My Fair Lady adapted Pygmalion, Guys and Dolls was derived from a pair of Damon Runyon stories and Kiss Me, Kate was based on The Taming of the Shrew? The proof, as always, is in the pudding. The recent history of the musical would be significantly poorer without Hairspray, The Band’s Visit and, God knows, The Light in the Piazza. Anyway, the evidence suggests that musicals are becoming more imaginative, not less so. This season’s crop included a Korean import about two robots in love, a nineteenth-century whaling tale that ended in shipwreck and cannibalism, and, weirdest of all, the new Dead Outlaw, a rock musical conceived by David Yazbek, who also penned the music and lyrics along with Erik Della Penna.  

The weirdness is right there in the plot, a true story so ridiculous that it sounds implausible. (The book is by Itamar Moses, Yazbek’s collaborator on The Band’s Visit.) Dead Outlaw is a shaggy-dog story that starts off as an extended version of a Moritat, one of those ballads about the life and death of a notorious outlaw that used to be performed for street crowds. (Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “The Ballad of Mack the Knife,” the opening number of their 1928 Threepenny Opera, is a take on a Moritat.) The subject is one Elmer McCurdy (Andrew Durand), born in Maine in 1870, who learns at the age of sixteen that the couple who raised him aren’t his real parents, that he was born out of wedlock to the woman he has always believed to be his spinster aunt. At that point his adoptive father has died and his adoptive mother, figuring she’s done enough for him, passes him back to his real mother. Elmer falls apart: he begins to drink heavily, and alcohol makes him paranoid and violent.

He sobers up, moves to small-town Kansas, lands a job in a plumbing supply store and courts his boss’s daughter. But the shadows he’s buried deep in his reformed personality emerge again and he becomes so threatening to the folks around him that he loses his footing in his new life and leaves town. He works in the mines; he joins the army. By the time he returns to civilian life he’s piled up enough different sorts of expertise that he can pass himself off as a demolitions expert to a gang of Oklahoma robbers. But he turns out to be a screw-up at that career, and the gang, a quartet of brothers, abandons him just before a posse can catch up with them. Elmer faces off the posse and they shoot him down. It’s now 1911. And that’s when the plot changes direction and takes us back to the other narrative line that the writers introduced early in the show: the discovery of an embalmed corpse in Long Beach in 1976. The second half of Dead Outlaw (the show runs about an hour and forty minutes without intermission) is the entertainingly tortuous tale of how Elmer’s body got from Oklahoma to California – and what happens next, because there’s more.

In its first half the sardonic tone of the musical and the protagonist’s hopeless life journey, the result of some combination of awful luck and dogged fate, might make you think of some of the Coen Brothers’ westerns and some of the ballads John Prine fashioned around unfortunate lives, especially on his first album. But the second half transforms it into an increasingly lunatic vaudeville. The style is Brechtian: an excellent rock band, ensconced upstage center, comments on the action. It consists of six musicians – Rebekah Bruce, JR Atkins, Hank Heaven, Brian Killeen, Spencer Cohen and a charismatic lead vocalist, Jeb Brown, who looks a little like Stacy Keach and has the largest role in the play (notwithstanding the fact that he’s been nominated for a Tony for featured actor in a musical). Durand is on stage continually and he’s commanding in the first half. For obvious reasons he has no lines in the second half, though his focused stillness is undeniably impressive. The entire ensemble is good in a range of roles, especially Thom Sesma and Eddie Cooper, who mainly play the two coroners, and Julia Knitel, who plays Elmer’s sweetheart, the shopkeeper’s daughter, and later Millicent, the adolescent daughter of the would-be entrepreneur who becomes the caretaker of the corpse. I won’t attempt to explain how that happens; it's more fun for readers who get to see Dead Outlaw if the narrative is permitted to spring its surprises.

Knitel sings two of the best songs in the show, “A Stranger” and “Millicent’s Song.” Yazbek’s work with Della Penna is one of the standout features of the musical, and it doesn’t bear much resemblance to his other scores. But then one of his distinctions as a composer is that his music has such stylistic variety. His other musicals are The Full Monty, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tootsie and The Band’s Visit. Tootsie is the one I’m not crazy about; my favorite Yazbeck score is Women on the Verge, which deserved a much longer run. His lyrics are more easily identifiable because of their buoyant wit and inventiveness. I’d say he’s the most gifted lyricist writing musicals today, and one of our finest composers.

This unconventional musical has been given a first-class production by the always-busy David Cromer on Arnulfo Maldonado’s set, which Heather Gilbert has lit. (Cromer also helmed George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s stage adaptation of their film Good Night, and Good Luck, which is playing two blocks south of Dead Outlaw.) Some of the most lavishly praised musicals of the last few years, like A Strange Loop and Kimberly Akimbo, aren’t really about anything except their resolute offbeat-ness, and I found both of them irritatingly self-congratulatory. Dead Outlaw, by contrast, has a tossed-off quality that understates the quality of the material. It isn’t profound but it is substantial. It’s about the interplay of celebrity and fate, about the qualities that constitute a modern-day myth. (That’s a theme that has sometimes obsessed the Coen Brothers, too.) It’s a compelling show – I would almost say a hypnotic one. 

The company of Buena Vista Social Club. (Photo: Matthew Murphy.)

Buena Vista Social Club goes straight to the heart. This somewhat fictionalized dramatization of the beloved 1999 documentary by Wim Wenders about the coming together, under the auspices of Ry Cooder, of magnificent Havana musicians whose claim to international fame had been sidelined by the revolution floats on top of some of the most joyous music I’ve ever heard on a stage. (Marco Paguia served as music director and supervised the orchestrations and arrangements with the help of Javier Díaz and David Oquendo.) Marco Ramirez’s book shifts back and forth between 1958, on the cusp of the revolution, and 1996, and the most important musicians are seen in both younger and older versions. They are Compay Segundo, guitarist (Da’von T. Moody and Julio Monge); Rubén González, pianist (Leonardo Reyna and Jainardo Batista Sterling); and the lead singers, Omara Portuondo (Isa Antonetti and Natalie Venetia Belcon) and Ibrahim Ferrer (Wesley Wray and Mel Semé). Omara begins as half of a duo with her sister Haydee (Ashley de la Rosa), who are offered a recording contract with Capitol Records and given the opportunity to emigrate to the U.S. with the promise of stardom beckoning. But Omara takes up a different invitation, to perform with local musicians at a club on the wrong side of town where the music and the dancing are freer and wilder. In the end she stays in Havana, missing her chance to flee Cuba, because she is committed to the music; she never sees her sister again, and Haydee’s career fizzles in the U.S. without her. Castro closes the local clubs and the group of performers who inspired Omara breaks up – until record producer Juan de Marcos (Justin Cunningham) travels to Havana in 1996 with a plan to resurrect the short-lived band. (The real de Marcos served as musical consultant.)

Buena Vista Social Club doesn’t just sound terrific. It’s buoyed by splendid dance numbers choreographed mostly by the Cuban American choreographer Patricia Delgado, whose husband, Justin Peck, the current acting resident choreographer of New York City Ballet, stepped in to stage two sensational showpiece numbers.. Saheem Ali, who developed the material (Dead Outlaw’s David Yazbek is listed as creative consultant), has staged it handsomely, and the design team – Arnuldo Maldonado once again on sets, Dede Ayite on costumes, and especially Tyler Micoleau on lighting – infuses the show with a vibrant palette. The book is modest but it gets better as it goes along; the two-character scenes in the second act, especially one that Omara imagines between herself and the absent Haydee are movingly written. (Reportedly the text has improved considerably, along with the production values, since it opened at the Atlantic Stage Company before its Broadway transfer.) 

 There’s a sweetness to the entire ensemble, but the actor-singers in the older roles are stronger. I enjoyed watching Antonetti, especially in her songs, but as the older, tougher Omara, Belcon has a mesmerizing regal presence, and she gives one of those musical-theatre performances that has the power to vivify you and wipe you out at the same time. The Tony nominating committee determined that Antonetti belongs in the leading actress category and Belcon among the supporting women, but that division is arbitrary – the two parts seem to me to be pretty much evenly split – and it’s Belcon who dominates the musical. You want to throw flowers at her feet.

Jonathan Groff as Bobby Darin in Just in Time. (Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.)

Watching Jonathan Groff play drama – on the HBO series and sequel Looking or in the two seasons of Mindhunter – is rewarding, but musical theatre releases something magical in him. It’s not just that he’s a first-rate singer and dancer but that he’s such a joyous performer; he grooves on giving pleasure to an audience. Even if you’ve never seen him on stage, I think you can get the idea if you look at his tribute to Sutton Foster in the Miscast clip where he replicates her rendition of the title song from the Kathleen Marshall revival of Anything Goes. He looks like he’s in bliss and all he wants is to spread around his amazing luck in getting to perform. As Bobby Darin in Just in Time, he’s simply fantastic – certainly as good as he was in Merrily We Roll Along, maybe even better. The musical, developed and directed by Alex Timbers and presented as a kind of biographical lounge act, is impeccably produced and witty enough to skate around the pitfalls of jukebox musical bios for the first act. In act two the melodrama we hoped we were going to skip takes over. But the show has built up so much good feeling by then that you’re willing to forgive the flaws in the Warren Leight-Isaac Oliver script, which are probably unavoidable. And who wouldn’t take them in stride when Groff is on stage for two and a half hours? The supporting cast, which includes Michele Pawk as Darin’s mother, Emily Bergl as his sister, Joe Barbara as his brother-in-law (who functions as a combination personal assistant and bodyguard) and Erika Henningsen as Sandra Dee, provides cheering support, and Gracie Lawrence is both irrepressible and grounded as Connie Francis. Here’s another case where the designers deserve their own round of applause: Derek McLane (set), Catherine Zuber (costumes) and Justin Townsend (lights). It costs an arm and a leg to see a Broadway show these days, but you can’t bitch about the production values. 

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies