Real ‘Dead Outlaw’ Elmer McCurdy Finds Fame As Broadway Musical Fans Leave Tributes At Gravesite
A cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma, is seeing an unusual increase in foot traffic lately, ever since real-life dead outlaw Elmer McCurdy has become Broadway‘s most famous corpse.
McCurdy’s bizarre tale is the subject of the Tony-nominated musical Dead Outlaw. The newly minted celebrity died in a shoot-out with an Oklahoma sheriff’s posse after robbing a train in 1911. He was 31, and so estranged from whatever loved ones he had that his thoroughly embalmed and well-preserve corpse was used, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not, as a sideshow attraction, movie prop, wax museum exhibit and, finally, as a hanged man in a funhouse exhibition at The Pike amusement park in Long Beach, California.
It was only when a production crew for The Six Million Dollar Man was filming scenes for a carnival episode in 1976 that McCurdy’s humanity was rediscovered: A prop man broke the arm of the “mannequin,” exposing bone and muscle tissue.
The strange but true tale is the subject of Dead Outlaw, which stars Tony-nominated Andrew Durand as Elmer, both in life and in death. Written by Itamar Moses, with music and lyrics from David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna, and directed by David Cromer, Dead Outlaw opened at the Longacre Theatre to unanimous rave reviews on Sunday, April 27, and is nominated for seven Tony Awards.
Now the real McCurdy is having a day in the sun, so to speak. Fans of the show are visiting his grave and, according to a staff member at the cemetery, who confirmed to the production, leaving mementos, most often Dead Outlaw Playbills.
Posthumous fame has come to McCurdy once before (and that’s not counting the years of anonymous fame in wax museums and funhouses). After his identity was established in 1977, he was at long last given a proper burial at Oklahoma’s Guthrie Summit View Cemetery, to considerable publicity, and where he remains today. To discourage thieves and curiosity seekers, two feet of concrete was poured over his casket.
