Life, love and death in the blues
The hero with the giant fists and his enchanting armless beloved could’ve walked right out of an old folk ballad and emerged through the pages of a comic book.
The music rides early blues and spirituals into the realm of hip-hop with a full-out gospel fervor that’s impossible to resist.
[...] why would you want to? “The Unfortunates,” as seen at its Thursday, Feb. 18, press opening at ACT’s Strand Theater, is musical theater as an unpretentiously homemade delight.
Commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where Cooper’s first production was a hit of 2013 season, it’s been extensively reworked at American Conservatory Theater for two years by its core team — actors-songwriters Jon Beavers, Ian Merrigan and Ramiz Monsef, music director, co-composer, guitarist and pianist Casey Lee Hurt and playwright Kristoffer Diaz.
Key revisions reportedly included a new opening scene and heightening the role of the armless chanteuse Rae — who isn’t actually missing any limbs at first (a great deal of the playful visual magic resides in the costumes of Katherine O’Neill).
It’s basically a boy’s story — a kind of fever-dream, on the verge of being executed, of battling through war, bar fights, crap games and a ravaging plague to try to save one’s sweetheart.
The narrative can be as evasive as the source that inspired the collaborators, the ancient, multifarious folk-blues standard “St. James Infirmary,” bits of which pervade the score, script and design.
The bar and its habitues invoke many eras, as does the drunken trio of rural fun-or-trouble-seekers who enter — big, swaggering Joe and his faithful comrades, celebrating his fighting prowess, Beavers’ smartly comic and light-footed Coughlin and Christopher Livingston’s slyly funny and tuneful CJ.
Monsef’s all-purpose villain — he’s the Enemy who captures Joe and his buddies, the insidious craps-master Joe must overcome and the unscrupulous remedy-peddling Doctor who runs, yes, St. James Infirmary — is a collective incarnation of everlasting evil.