LAUREN FRAYER, HOST:
What are the odds that two original musical comedies, based on real historical stories which feature corpses, land on Broadway at the same time? You don't need to calculate that because the British show "Operation Mincemeat" and the American show "Dead Outlaw" are entertaining audiences on Broadway right now. Jeff Lunden has this report.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character, singing) Your mama's dead.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character, singing) Your daddy's dead.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character, singing) Your brother's dead.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character, singing) And so are you.
JEFF LUNDEN, BYLINE: Andrew Durand, a living, breathing actor, spends half of "Dead Outlaw" playing Elmer McCurdy, a troubled young wannabe train robber. Then in the second half of the show, he plays his mummified corpse, standing up stock still in a wood coffin. Durand says the show's director told him there could be a dummy in the coffin.
ANDREW DURAND: But I think it's going to be really impactful and important to actually have the person in there to remind the audience of the humanity of this corpse that was sort of ignored all these decades as people were making money off of his dead back. So that sort of inspired me and gave me the footing to say, like, OK, it's an important part of the story and the storytelling, so I can do it.
LUNDEN: It's an audacious aspect of a show which looks at the true history of a man who tried and failed to become an outlaw. He was shot dead in 1911 by a posse, and then after his corpse went unclaimed, he became a sideshow attraction. His mummified remains were found in a California amusement park in 1976.
DAVID YAZBEK: This idea is decades and decades in the making.
LUNDEN: Songwriter David Yazbek, who wrote "The Band's Visit," learned the story from a college friend. He started doing research, eventually wrote some songs with another musician, and then turned it into a musical.
YAZBEK: It is ultra-American. It's all the interesting stuff - fame, greed, crime, mortality. There's guns aplenty.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character, singing) If you want to do a side show, your classic 10 and 1, you've got to have a mummy to make the suckers come. It gets a man a-thinking, a lump inside his throat, and that goes in the wallet I keep inside my coat.
LUNDEN: If "Dead Outlaw" is ultra-American, "Operation Mincemeat" is very British.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTORS: (As characters, singing) For some were born to follow, but we were born to lead. We are the masters. We are the masters. We are the clever men who hold the reins. Oh, who needs guns when you've got brains? You'll see.
LUNDEN: This show is based on a real false flag operation MI5, the British Intelligence Service, concocted to convince the Nazis that they were not going to invade Sicily. They had a corpse wash up on the Spanish coast with made-up documents saying the Allies were invading elsewhere.
ZOE ROBERTS: It's not about armies and invasions and fighting on the ground.
LUNDEN: Zoe Roberts is one of the show's creators and plays many roles, from the officer supervising the operation to Ian Fleming, who was part of the unit.
ROBERTS: What it is is about a small team of people trying to achieve something extraordinary. It's almost like a spy caper or a heist. It's "Ocean's 11" in the war with a dead body.
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LUNDEN: While we never see the corpse in "Operation Mincemeat," he's indicated by a hat and a briefcase. What both shows share is a sense of theatrical play. Their small casts perform multiple roles, and there's a lot of gender-bending. Jak Malone, who won an Olivier Award in London, plays an American pilot, a coroner and Hester Leggatt, a stalwart MI5 secretary.
JAK MALONE: I describe it as the closest thing you can get to childhood level of play, like elementary school level of play. The costumes is the hard part, and then switching characters is very fun, very easy.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yeah.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character, singing) And why did we meet in the middle of a war? What a silly thing for anyone to do. Your sister sends her love, of course. And your mother is the same as ever.
LUNDEN: Songwriter David Yazbek says, where many Broadway shows resort to expensive scenic effects, there's much value in ingenuity and simplicity.
YAZBEK: Seeing that there are very, very creative solutions behind the scenes, and then the value in letting the audience use their imaginations instead of just slamming them, slamming them with, you know, visual tropes and expensive effects and stuff like that.
LUNDEN: For NPR News, I'm Jeff Lunden in New York.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character, singing) Joe Young is dead. Bert Convy's dead. Glenn Gould is dead. And so are you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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