Former Columbia College Chicago Theatre student and faculty member and Columbia College Honorary Degree recipient David Cromer HDR ’17, winner of the 2018 Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for The Band’s Visit, has re-teamed with his Band’s Visit collaborators on a new Broadway production, Dead Outlaw. The show, which began previews April 12, opens April 27 at the Longacre Theatre in New York City’s midtown theatre district. For more information, click here.

As previously reported in this blog, Dead Outlaw enjoyed an Off-Broadway run in 2024. The show has a script by Itamar Moses and a rockabilly score by David Yazbek and Eric Della Penna, coauthors of The Band’s Visit, which swept the Tony Awards (Broadway’s top prize) in 2018, winning in the categories of Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, Best Original Score, and Best Direction. Dead Outlaw is based on the true story of Elmer McCurdy, a bank robber whose 1911 death at the hands of a Western posse ended a life of failed crime and alcoholism and began a brilliant career as a mummified side-show attraction that traveled the U.S. for decades.

The show’s lighting designer is Heather Gilbert, a former faculty member in the Columbia College Chicago School of Theatre and Dance’s Theatre Design and Technology program, who won the 2020 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lighting Design for a Play for her lighting design for the drama The Sound Inside, also directed by Cromer.