‘Dead Outlaw’ review: Wild corpse musical is too tame on Broadway

There’s a nagging similarity between the 20th-century criminal Elmer McCurdy and “Dead Outlaw,” the eccentric musical about him.

McCurdy was killed in a shoot-out with police after a bungled train robbery in 1911. And then, in a stomach-churning turn of events, his mummified corpse was carted around the country for decades as an attraction in unsavory​ traveling tourist museums.

“Dead Outlaw,” which opened Sunday at the Longacre Theatre, has also been schlepped a distance — from the cool and intimate Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village to a big Broadway house uptown.

It, too, has become a bit stiff in the process.

I quite enjoyed the scrappy first incarnation last year, and still admire the score by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna that stitches together rockabilly, campfire songs, lounge music and folk into an eerie Americana soundscape that’s punchy and unsettling.

And the clever conceit of the show from writer Itamar Moses — that McCurdy is a mostly silent cadaver for half the runtime — is smart and sad; a stinging comment on the grotesque lengths some (many, really) will go to make a buck.

But in the Broadway version of “Dead Outlaw,” directed by David Cromer, there is a lot of dead air.

Well, except in the glass-shattering opener, a rascally ​s​creamer called “Dead” that’s blared by an onstage band in a shoebox that looks like a ​college dropout’s garage​. The playfully rude lyrics rattle off people who are no longer alive (the joke is that many of them actually are) and concludes with “and so are you!” Think of ​t​he unifying cry as “Ich bin ein Elmer!”

The group’s frontman is actor Jeb Brown, perfectly cast with a husky radio voice, who becomes the narrator​ — Mr. Rogers after midnight. At first the effect is like listening to a weird-but-true podcast before bed. Soon, though, the “and then this happened”s become — forgive me — overkill.​ 

Elmer, both when pathetically alive and famously deceased, is played by Andrew Durand, an easy-to-like actor who audiences will remember as the romantic lead from “Shucked” and “Head Over He​els.” As his resume of curiosities would suggest, he’s Broadway’s go-to guy for “odd.”

Durand is adorably awkward as Elmer tries and tries and fails and fails to make it as​ even a D-List bandit.

A violent drunk who hops from town to town, ​a​dopting new identities along the way, Durand’s Elmer softly croons a​ lovely Ben Folds-y tune called “Normal” and hollers a feverish one called “I Killed A Man in Maine.” ​In the rambunctious latter, he hurls objects across the stage and attempts to knock down Arnulfo Maldonado​’s set. 

In the second half, with sunken eyes and a razor-sharp jaw line — and I mean this as a compliment — he plays dead very well.​ The guy rarely ever blinks.

The show​ becomes more intriguing as the story grows wilder. Its most ​i​nvolving and moving number, in more ways than one, is called “Millicent’s Song” and is sung by a little girl whose dad has acquired Elmer’s body​ and is storing it at their house. At first she’s rightly horrified by the sight, but soon starts​ sweetly confiding to the dead man like a therapist.

Time passes as she grows up​, funny evolves into poignant, and her conversations with the unchanging Elmer mature. Julia Knitel sings sublimely, and the song creatively ticks down the years, rather than having the narrator announce ​w​hen and where we are. Again.

​T​here’s also a memorable cruise-ship ditty called “Up to the Stars,” smoothly performed by Thom Sesma as the coroner as if he’s Michael Buble is another dark delight. It’s something out of “Six Feet Under.”​ You’ll either be tickled by the coroner’s punchlines (“Natalie Wood? Natalie Won’t”) or horrified and offended.

The musical has many​ diamonds in the rough. They’re just not ​p​olished properly by Cromer’s staging, which is awfully haphazard and diffuse for a typically sure-thing director. Scenes far off to the side feel quickly cobbled together, even though the show premiered more than a year ago.

“Outlaw” reminds me of the rebel rock musical “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” crossed with a bone-dry Coen Brothers film. There’s room for something ​s​o subversive on Broadway. But not when the production’s energy level is that of a funeral parlor at 8 a.m.