“Dead Outlaw” — now there’s a musical that knows how to put a corpse on stage. The musical about the well-traveled mummy of small-time crook Elmer McCurdy opens next month on Broadway after a run downtown last year. The great late Charles Ludlam also knew how to make full use of the riotous Grand Guignol effect of a corpse(s) in such Ridiculous Theatre classics as “Artificial Jungle” and “Stage Blood.”
Perhaps, then, it is the vaunted Old Blighty reserve and good taste that fumbles “Operation Mincemeat,” the World War II story of how the corpse of a tramp, Glyndwr Michael, fooled the Nazis into thinking the British were invading Sardinia instead of Sicily.