A cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma, is seeing an uncommon enhance in foot site visitors currently, ever since real-life lifeless outlaw Elmer McCurdy has develop into Broadway‘s most well-known corpse.
McCurdy’s weird story is the topic of the Tony-nominated musical Useless Outlaw. The newly minted movie star died in a shoot-out with an Oklahoma sheriff’s posse after robbing a prepare in 1911. He was 31, and so estranged from no matter family members he had that his completely embalmed and well-preserve corpse was used, typically knowingly, typically not, as a sideshow attraction, film prop, wax museum exhibit and, lastly, as a hanged man in a funhouse exhibition at The Pike amusement park in Lengthy Seaside, California.
It was solely when a manufacturing crew for The Six Million Greenback Man was filming scenes for a carnival episode in 1976 that McCurdy’s humanity was rediscovered: A prop man broke the arm of the “model,” exposing bone and muscle tissue.
The unusual however true story is the topic of Useless Outlaw, which stars Tony-nominated Andrew Durand as Elmer, each in life and in demise. Written by Itamar Moses, with music and lyrics from David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna, and directed by David Cromer, Useless Outlaw opened on the Longacre Theatre to unanimous rave opinions on Sunday, April 27, and is nominated for seven Tony Awards.
Now the actual McCurdy is having a day within the solar, so to talk. Followers of the present are visiting his grave and, in line with a employees member on the cemetery, who confirmed to the manufacturing, leaving mementos, most frequently Useless Outlaw Playbills.
Posthumous fame has come to McCurdy as soon as earlier than (and that’s not counting the years of nameless fame in wax museums and funhouses). After his identification was established in 1977, he was in the end given a correct burial at Oklahoma’s Guthrie Summit View Cemetery, to appreciable publicity, and the place he stays at this time. To discourage thieves and curiosity seekers, two toes of concrete was poured over his casket.
