[music]

Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar, in for Alison Stewart. Dead Outlaw is a musical from the creators of Broadway's The Band's Visit that proves sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. I stumbled into a performance last week, and I've got to tell you, it was wild, exhilarating, and hilarious. It follows this real criminal named Elmer McCurdy, who was made out to be larger-than-life after his death.

The real Elmer McCurdy was a failed outlaw and safecracker. He died in a standoff with the police, but that's really where the story begins. After his death, people find absurd ways to benefit off of making up stories about him. The show tells this story through a live rock band playing and singing right at you on stage. While this band is rocking out, the stage is moving, symbols are flying, and there's a standoff between police and train robbers happening around them.

It's like someone left the doors to a theater open and a bunch of talented performers showed up and said, "We're going to drive this car like we stole it, or at least until the cops show up." Dead Outlaw runs at the Audible Theater through April 14th, and a cast recording of its song is coming out later this year. I am thrilled to be joined now in WNYC Studio 5 by that live band, led by music director Rebekah Bruce, as well as Erik Della Penna, who co-wrote the music and lyrics for this show. Also, here are actors Julia Knitel, Thom Sesma, and Jeb Brown, who will be performing some tunes for us. Everyone altogether, welcome to All Of It.

Speakers: Thank you.

Kousha Navidar: Jeb, let's start with you. Let's kick things off with a song. You play the narrator in Dead Outlaw, so I'm going to ask you to tee us off and set up the song. What are we about to hear?

Jeb Brown: We're about to hear what might be our theme song. The title of the show is Dead Outlaw. The song's called Dead, and it bookends the show. We play it once in the prologue, and then we play it later at the end of the show. It's interesting to hear from audiences how differently they receive it 90 minutes after they first heard it.

Kousha Navidar: Go for it.

Jeb Brown: This is all Dead.

Speaker: Here we go, y'all.

[MUSIC - The Band's Visit: Dead]

Kousha Navidar: Dead Outlaw at the Audible Theater through April 14th. We are so lucky to be joined by the cast, the performers of this show. We are going to talk a little bit about the conceiving of the show. Erik Della Penna, I have a question for you. You wrote the music and lyrics for Dead Outlaw with David Yazbek, who's credited with conceiving the show. How did Yazbek approach you with the idea for this musical?

Erik Della Penna: It was a long time ago in the late '90s. We were both musicians and songwriters in town and his career took off in theater. I also played in his band. He heard this story from another musician. I think it was a news item for a while, so people knew about it. It wasn't hidden. He said, "I think we should write this." We never did for 20 years [laughter]. Just before COVID, we took a crack at it. We wrote two tunes, and then COVID hit, and then nobody had anything to do. That was the time to write the music.

Kousha Navidar: What interested you about this story of Elmer McCurdy?

Erik Della Penna: It's a good story. It's not hard to be intrigued by it.

Kousha Navidar: What about as a musician? When you learned about this story, were you like, "Oh, man, I already have songs going into my head?"

Erik Della Penna: Sure. There's so many details, and facts, and forensic nuggets that are just great fodder for a song. It was easy.

Kousha Navidar: One of the wonderful things about this story is that you're able to pull apart elements of the story, the forensic element that you're talking about, and it exploded into these songs that dive into characters we might not otherwise know about. We're going to get into the band's importance in the show in a little bit, but the way that we see that is really through the actors whose song we'll be hearing throughout the segment. We've heard from Jeb the narrator. Thom and Julia, would you please introduce yourself? Julia, let's start with you.

Julia Knitel: Hi, I'm Julia Knitel. I play all the women in this story.

[laughter]

Kousha Navidar: Thom?

Thom Sesma: I'm Thom Sesma. I think the program says I play Actor 4, which means I play a number of characters, but the main character that I play is the celebrity coroner, Thomas Noguchi.

Kousha Navidar: When you think about Elmer McCurdy's story, what stands out to you both as performers? You're occupying many different roles throughout the show. You're going into parts of his life. Did you know about Elmer McCurdy beforehand? Did you learn about this while you were performing? How did you approach it as actors?

Julia Knitel: I remember I got sent the script before my audition, and I read the whole thing and could not get it out of my mind because it's one of those stories that consumes you, because it's unlike anything you've ever heard before. Every detail is true and you can't get it out of your mind. It was really exciting that we got the opportunity to do it. I know that all of us who did the workshop in the fall were pretty obsessed with it off the bat, wouldn't you say?

Thom Sesma: Absolutely. It was one of those things you read the script and you go, "There's no possible way that this could work." A writer couldn't make this up, so it has to be true. Actors pay a lot of lip service to being truthful every single minute, like recreating a truth. The stakes are so high on this because the story is just so out of the box. It's so weird, and so our obligation to being truthful is even higher in some way. So much of what we're doing on stage as actors is counterintuitive because this stuff is true. It's not made up.

Kousha Navidar: Not only is it true, the story itself, but one interesting thing about this show is the interaction between actors and band is quite true because the band are musicians that are performing, not acting. They're actually just performing on stage. How is it for you having a show where you have this authenticity that you might otherwise not have access to because these musicians are musicians first and they're just performing as they would any other show?

Julia Knitel: I think it helps ground us. I think it keeps us all in that reality. It feels less like a traditional musical and more like a folk rock concert that we just step out and do scenes sometimes. [laughs]

Thom Sesma: The whole language of the play is about storytelling. Not just in a narrative sense, but in the way you tell a story and what it means to the audience, how they hear, how a story is told, and we're just one component of that. David Cromer, our brilliant director, in the course of rehearsals kept saying over and over and over again, "This whole thing is like one long run on sentence with people handling one phrase and then passing it off to another." Sometimes it's musical, sometimes it's in a scene, but it never ever stops. In a weird way, it's not like we're ever dealing with a band or the score as a separate thing. It's just part of one long crimson thread, if you will.

Kousha Navidar: Trains are a big part of the show. It sounds like you're laying down the tracks as the train is moving along. Perfect.

Julia Knitel: Beautiful metaphor.

Kousha Navidar: Thank you. We've got another song maybe. Could you set it up for us, Thom?

Thom Sesma: Oh, yes. This is a song sung by the aforementioned celebrity coroner, Thomas Noguchi, who has done a deep dive into what Elmer is. I don't think it's giving away any secrets, but he's been dealing with the remains of Elmer McCurdy in the course of the play. Somewhere near the end, he sums up what Elmer means to him and I think to everyone else.

[MUSIC - The Band's Visit]

Marilyn Monroe

When she left the show

Came to my table not long ago

Our final scene

Me and Norma Jean

End the favor tag on her toe

When Elvis broke

That is the tether

Our time together

It'll be in my memoirs

In which I write

I wonder whether

He floated like a feather

Up to the stars

Oh, Natalie, would

Oh, Natalie won't

Leave a legend

When she left that boat

Who, when and why

Did this person die

Go fish the ocean

Where the answers float

For Sharon Tate

So dark and scary

So arbitrary

It left some nasty scars

But set me straight

These things you bury

It ain't what you carry

Up to the stars.

Take it Hank Evan

Come out, yes

Once I get you up here

On the stainless steel

I'll take the wheel

And watch is right

Once I get you up here

Where it's all so real

You can't conceal what's deep inside of you

You are dead, dead, dead

Blind, deaf, and dumb

You are just a mommy

So you mum mum mum

I can't make you walk

But I'll make you talk

Tell me what you were

Tell me where you are from

The cause of death for now is pending

Soon I'll be sending off to the lab in just

Pieces of you that needs some tending

For that happy ending up to the truth

When we conceive it and we believe it

That's when your story is finally [unintelligible 00:15:22]

Till we achieve it

We'll have to leave it

Up to the stars

Up to the stars

Oh, shiny stars

Twinkle twinkle stars.

Kousha Navidar: Wow. We are listening to the cast and band of Dead Outlaw, which is at the Audible Theater through April 14th. I love that Frank Sinatra little nod during that song. That's so lovely.

Thom Sesma: I'm going to correct you.

Kousha Navidar: Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Thom Sesma: It's Bobby Darin actually-

Kousha Navidar: Oh, Bobby Darin, oh.

Thom Sesma: -is my role model for that.

Kousha Navidar: I reveal my crooner lack of knowledge there. I appreciate that correction.

Thom Sesma: But it doesn't get better than Frank.

Kousha Navidar: It doesn't, they're all great.

Thom Sesma: I couldn't possibly.

Kousha Navidar: Maybe, listening to you, you're pretty good too. I've got to say.

Thom Sesma: Thank you.

Kousha Navidar: We've heard from the actors and now I'd love to talk about the band, which is center stage for almost all of the production. Rebekah Bruce is the music director, the conductor, plays piano, does vocals. Rebekah, could you introduce yourselves, the band and the instruments that they're playing?

Rebekah Bruce: Yes. Hi, I'm Rebekah and I've just been introduced, but we have Spencer on the drums.

Spencer: What's up?

Rebekah Bruce: Hi, Spencer. We have Chris on bass.

Kousha Navidar: Hey, Chris.

Rebekah Bruce: Hank on guitar, electric, acoustic and we have Erik, who you already heard from on several instruments. Electric guitar, lap steel, banjo, mandolin. Is that all of them?

Speaker: Yes.

Rebekah Bruce: Yes.

Kousha Navidar: Big variety of instruments. They're all sitting with us right now, listeners, in the stage. It is a full 180 degrees panorama of different instruments and multiple people playing multiple things. Rebekah, the question I have for you is, as the show's music director and member of the band, I noticed you were also conducting on stage. How do you balance all of these roles while you're on stage in the show?

Rebekah Bruce: It's taking on and taking off many hats constantly. It's juggling. It feels like juggling, keeping it all in the air. You're trying to do a lot of different things at once and it's tricky to do them all but you just keep all the balls in the air.

Kousha Navidar: Erik, question for you, thinking about the band, when was it clear to you and the other creative team that the band would play such a central part in the show?

Erik Della Penna: Early versions of this, before we had the great script and book by Itamar Moses, we only had the songs. We would perform the songs in concert and Yazbek would just tell the story of Elmer to thread them all together. I guess it was a song cycle. Is that what a song cycle is? When the book was being written, we decided to retain that quality of it because the best part of the story is to keep reminding people that it really happened, because in just telling somebody the Elmer McCurdy story, people stop you two minutes into it and say, "Wait, wait, this really happened?" You have to keep saying, "Yes, this really happened and then this and then this, and then--," so that was an important part of the storytelling.

Kousha Navidar: I'd love to get to one more song if we could. Julia, we're going to go out on the song that you sing in the show. Could you give some background on the song? What should we know about how it fits into the story?

Julia Knitel: Yes. In part two of our show, Elmer is a dead body played brilliantly by Andrew Durand. He comes into contact with many different people and one of them is a little girl who finds him in her house and they become very close friends. Throughout the song, you watch their relationship develop and learn a little bit more about her, whose name is Millicent.

Kousha Navidar: All right, let's hear that.

[MUSIC - Julia Knitel: The Band's Visit]

You are a funny-looking thing

How'd you get that scary face?

You're so ugly I just have say

Well that isn't very nice

I'm so sorry- what I said

because I don't like it

when they're saying it to me

Those girls at school

could make me cry

but I don't let them see

What would you do

if you were me?

There's a boy I think I like

and his name is Stephen Hill

What I don't know is if he likes me

Well, I laugh at all his jokes

and he often looks at me

when he does

somehow I always look away

and it's only you

that I can tell

as strange as that may be

What would you do

if you were me?

Life is changing pretty fast

I'll be moving pretty soon

so I won't be seeing much of you

While you get to stay the same

as I wish that I could too

growing up ain't as easy as it seems

So keep my secrets here with you

because I'll have more, you'll see

wait here, wait here

wait for me.

Kousha Navidar: We're listening to the cast and band of Dead Outlaw, gracing us with some of their songs. That was Julia Knitel, an actor with the vocals of Millicent in that part. Rebekah, question for you. This is such a musical song. The writing, even just the absurdity of it, really gets captured in the music itself. Any favorite musical moments of the show that really excite you night after night?

Rebekah Bruce: Oh my gosh, so many. The opening riff. The opening riff I think is, to me, the most exciting. As soon as we start, I'm like, yes, here we go. Let's do it.

Kousha Navidar: What is it about it?

Rebekah: What is it about it? It's the tone of the guitars, it's the tempo. It's awesome.

Kousha Navidar: Erik, last question to you. You think about all of these different style that you hear. If you had to tell listeners, this is the sound of Dead Outlaw in maybe 30 seconds or less, how would you describe it?

Erik Della Penna: Mid-20th century Americana.

Kousha Navidar: What would people say if they wanted to know-- what would you hope people walk away from when they're watching the show? Tough, I know. A good time, I guess, right?

Erik Della Penna: Walk away with. A sense of the timeliness of existence and to not get-- don't sweat the trivial things and just try to be a better person.

Kousha Navidar: We'll roll with that. Dead Outlaw is at the Minetta Lane Theatre, also known as the Audible Theater, through April 14th. The cast recordings will be out later this year. I want to say thank you all so much. Let's just say goodbye on three. One, two, three.

All: Goodbye.

Erik Della Penna: Thank you.

Rebekah: Thank you.

Kousha Navidar: This was All Of It. Thank you for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.

 

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