It probably doesn’t help that whenever he grabs some nitroglycerin to crack a safe, Douglas MacArthur (Ken Marks) — Elmer’s old commander at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where he joined the Army for a while — starts hectoring him in his head: “That’s not how you do it, maggot!”
The show takes a too-lengthy detour into the story of an ambitious young Cherokee man, possibly as a contrast to Elmer’s laziness and a rebuke to his racism. (He is sure he is more deserving of the local Osage people’s money than they are.) Weirdly, the musical exhibits no curiosity about Elmer’s birth mother, who is almost a non-presence — though with the only woman in the cast playing his aunt, that might just be a practical consideration.
Still, this is lean-in storytelling, performed by eight actors conjuring several dozen characters. With a high-energy onstage band conducted by Rebekah Bruce and including Della Penna on guitar, banjo, vocals and wailing lap steel, the score hopscotches from country to rock to jazz. (Sound design is by Kai Harada and Joshua Millican, soundscape composition by Isabella Curry, orchestrations by Della Penna, Yazbek and Dean Sharenow.)
Audible plans to release a recording of “Dead Outlaw.” Close your eyes and you can imagine what a vivid experience that might be, a whole Western landscape painted aurally. Live, though, you get to savor the visuals: our charming narrator (Jeb Brown) transforming into a disreputable, trench-coated bandit; Elmer’s tender dance with the spunky Maggie (Julia Knitel), in his doomed attempt at love and normalcy; Durand’s unnerving turn as Elmer’s corpse, propped upright in a coffin, swaying whenever someone moves it; the gruesome prop mummy (by Gloria Sun Productions) laid out on a coroner’s table.
In a fabulous moment, that coroner, Thomas Noguchi (Thom Sesma, perfect), grabs the dangling microphone meant for his autopsy notes and delivers a big, purple-lit, nightclub-style number — a high point of the show. (Lighting, by Heather Gilbert, is superb throughout.)
