Theater and Book Reviews: “Dead Outlaw” Is a Lively, New Broadway Musical; “Irishtown” Makes Fun of, but Is Also a Love Letter to, Irish Plays; and the Sincere “Theater Kid” Memoir Takes Us Into the Rooms Where Broadway History Happened

Dead Outlaw (c) Matthew Murphy

Broadway: Dead Outlaw 
Longacre Theatre 

When I heard the premise of the outrageously true story of Dead Outlaw, the new musical by the creative team behind the musical, The Band’s Visit, I was worried that the evening would be mostly about a singing corpse. Thankfully not. In fact, once the dead outlaw, Elmer McCurdy (Andrew Durand), dies in 1911, he mostly stays dead as his body and coffin become an after-death oddity sensation throughout most of the 20th century. Poor Durand stays in the upright coffin for the latter half of the show as Elmer’s mummified corpse (embalmed by arsenic) is the centerpiece of Hollywood movies, travelling circuses and beach boardwalk sideshows. Thankfully Durand has a lot more to do in the first half of the musical, as our narrator, played by Jeb Brown, tries to piece together as much of McCurdy’s life into a cohesive story as he can. Elmer, it seems, was a troubled alcoholic from Maine, who tried to lead an honest life, serving time in the army, finding love with a shopkeeper named Maggie (Julia Knitel) before getting involved with a family of bank and train robbers, ending in Elmer’s death in a shootout. At this point, the morbid part of Elmer’s cross-country journey starts, and it doesn’t end until his body is discovered in an old theater during the filming of a The Six Million Dollar Man TV episode in 1977. Book writer Itamar Moses and director David Cromer don’t sugarcoat McCurdy’s story, but instead utilize a distancing, Brechtian element to the narrative. 

The Interested Bystander: Final 2024-25 Tony Award Nomination Predictions

Maybe Happy Ending (c) Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

The Tony Nominations will be announced on Thursday, May 1. Between there and now, there will many factors that will affect the nominations, including rulings by the Tony Awards Committee regarding category eligibility, which is very unpredictable. There will also be awards announcements from other organizations that may sway the nominating committe. But, as of today, here are my best guesses for who will be nominated for this year's Tony Awards. 

Enjoy!

Theater Reviews: The Tragedy of “Floyd Collins” Arrives on Broadway in a First-Class Production; “John Proctor is the Villain” Is an Exciting Distillation of “The Crucible”; and “All the World’s a Stage” Is an Effective Chamber Musical

Floyd Collins (c) Joan Marcus

Broadway: Floyd Collins 
At Lincoln Center Theater's Vivian Beaumont Theater

One of the shining stars André Bishop discovered during his tenure as Artistic Director of off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons (and there have been many) is then newcomer composer Adam Guettel, who would eventually find big success with A Light in the Piazza, produced at Lincoln Center Theater, headed by…Bishop. It is no surprise that in Bishop’s last season at LCT before retirement he would revive Guettel’s first musical, 1996’s Floyd Collins, written with his collaborator, Tina Landau, now given a lavish production on Broadway. Floyd Collins is the true story of an ambitious young man who, in 1925, gets trapped in a cave he was exploring for a possible tourist stop, and the media circus that resulted surrounding how to rescue him. I saw the original Playwrights Horizons production, which I felt was demanding but ambitious, especially the score, which occasionally veered towards operatic writing. Now, almost thirty years later, audiences may be more attuned to what Guettel and Landau were going for, especially when satirizing how newspapers sensationalizing the story may in part have hindered rescue efforts. Now incorporating the vastness of the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Landau, repeating her role as director as well, is able to fully dramatize the extent of that part of the story. But she is also able to retain the intimacy of the toll it takes on Collins family, which turns out to be the most effective part of this production. 

Film Reviews: Enjoy Four Recent Heartwarming Indies: a Re-Imagined “The Wedding Banquet”; A Quirky Music Lover in “The Ballad of Wallis Island”; Arrested Development Men in “Sacramento”; and How Jonathan Groff Turns Out to Be “A Nice Indian Boy”

The Wedding Banquet (c) Luke Cyprian, Bleecker Street

Film: The Wedding Banquet 
In Cinemas 

I have always loved Ang Lee’s 1993 queer landmark film, The Wedding Banquet, which both announced the Taiwanese director’s talents (it was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar) and foreshadowed his highly acclaimed 2005’s Brokeback Mountain, the gay cowboy love story that won Lee his first Best Director Oscar. Now director Andrew Ahn has directed a reimagining of the film by the first film’s co-screenwriter James Schamus, and while it certainly feels updated, its adherence to the original plot points give it a nice symmetry (although the drunk night plot felt as dated today as it did in the 90s). In this version (now in Seattle), there are two gay couples: scientist Angela (Kelly Marie Tran, in her first major leading film role) and her social worker Lee (a down-to-Earth Lily Gladstone), and birdwatching tour guide Chris (Bowen Yang) and artist Min (Han Gi-Chan). It is Min, who’s the heir of a Korean corporate company, run by his grandmother Ja-Young (Minari Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung), but in order to stay in the country he needs to get married. Since he’s not out to his family (his grandfather would disown him), Min hatches a plan with Angela for her to marry him, and in return, he would pay for Lee’s expensive IVF treatments. But when Ja-Young makes a surprise visit, she demands a wedding and, of course, the wedding banquet. Ahn has always been a subtle, human-interaction type of director, even in his biggest hit, the gay comedy Fire Island, and it’s true for The Wedding Banquet as well. As much as the trailer makes it to be a raucous farce (the de-queering the house scene is a bit manic), Ahn gives each of the storylines a dignity and a grace, especially with scenes by the elder cast members. Joan Chen is fun as Angela’s proud PFLAG mother, and Youn Yuh-jung is just plain exquisite as the grandmother, stealing every scene, mostly by sitting still. It's no coincidence that the word for “grandmother” in Korean sounds like the English word “harmony.” But then again, the word for “father” in Korean also sounds like the British word for eggplant. Not sure about the symbolism there. 

Broadway: Two Icons Are Celebrated in Broadway Musicals — Stephen Sondheim Rhapsodized by New and “Old Friends” and Betty “BOOP!” Unleashed Cleverly in 2025 New York City

Sondheim's Old Friends (c) Matthew Murphy

Broadway: Sondheim’s Old Friends 
At the Samuel Friedman Theatre 

The new musical revue, Sondheim’s Old Friends, started out as a one-time concert celebration of the life-long friendship between British theater producer Cameron MacIntosh and the legendary musical composer Stephen Sondheim in May 2022. And while there are still remnants of this concert still evident (including the title and some needless photo montages), the new stage show, directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne (Swan Lake), refocuses the evening to a celebration of Sondheim’s genius. (His death in 2021 still feels fresh.) Instead of conceiving an original story to tie together the 40 songs, Bourne has decided to take two approaches: One is to present them as standalone, concert songs and the other is to recreate them as they would have been in a production of the show they are from. The latter presentations are sort of a shock as there have been so many revisionist reworking of so many of Sondheim’s shows that it feels kind of revolutionary that Bobby is once again played by a man and Amy is played by a woman in the Company sequence. While the concert was populated with a who’s who of mostly British luminaries (like Judi Dench and Petula Clark), only two performers have made the leap from that evening to Broadway (with the West End and L.A. productions in-between): the British actress Bonnie Langford and Broadway legend Bernadette Peters (it’s shocking that when the musical opened in London last fall, it was Peters’ West End debut!). Joining Peters as her co-headliner is the luminous Lea Salonga while Langford is joined by a mix of sixteen(!) British, Broadway and one Aussie mainstay performers (some Tony and/or Olivier winners) like Beth Leavel, Kate Jennings Grant, Gavin Lee and Joanna Riding.