Broadway review by Adam Feldman
In the realm of Broadway musicals, Swept Away represents a significant leap of faith. There have been plenty of musicals based on stories from the Bible, including two big hits adapted from the Gospels; there have been many shows about Christmas (including the newly revitalized Elf); and there has been no shortage of singing preachers, priests and nuns. But Swept Away employs religion in a categorically different way: Set at sea in the 1880s, it uses the songs of the Avett Brothers to tell a deeply Christian parable of guilt, temptation, sacrifice and redemption.
The Avett Brothers have written one new song, “Lord Lay Your Hand on My Shoulder,” for Swept Away; four of the other 13 songs in this one-act, 90-minute show are from the folk-rock troubadours’ 2016 album True Sadness, and five are from 2004’s Mignonette. The title of the latter album refers to the infamous death of a cabin boy after the 1884 wreck of an English yacht, and that incident also informs the plot of Swept Away (as it did last year’s Life of Pi, whose fearsome tiger bore the cabin boy’s name: Richard Parker). If you know the history of the real-life Mignonette, you may have an inkling of the ghoulish sea fare this seafaring tale has in store.
Swept Away | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid
Swept Away is not, though, the story of Mignonette. In winding his tale around the Avett Brothers’ songs, book writer John Logan—who has previously crafted both a jukebox musical (Moulin Rouge!) and a nautical one (The Last Ship)—has created an entirely new disaster scenario. The show has only four characters, none of them named. Mate (John Gallagher Jr.) is a self-described “handsome young scapegrace” who, in the latest twist of his “circuitous downward spiral” of sin, has taken a job on a storm-tossed whaling vessel. (Echoes of the Book of Jonah are likely intentional.) The ship is steered by a grizzled Captain (Wayne Duvall); its crew includes Little Brother (Adrian Blake Enscoe), a beautiful young man who has run away from the farm in search of adventure, and his pious Big Brother (Stark Sands), who watches him with concern.
Directed by Michael Mayer, the musical is presented as a flashback in two starkly different halves, bookended at either end by scenes of an older Mate dying in a tuberculosis ward. (This is fully in keeping with Broadway’s Old-Narrator Trope Requirement Act of 2024.) The first section, set on the New England whaler, unfolds in a familiar musical-theater idiom. The characters define themselves quickly in song: Little Brother bounds aboard with the eagerness of the Star to Be in Annie—"I’m packed and ready to set sail / I got a lot of friends to make!”—in stark contrast with the louche Mate and the wave-weary Captain on his final sea voyage. The principal quartet is set in relief against a dozen burly, bearded sailors who, stamping through David Neumann’s choreography, would not be out of place performing "Blow High, Blow Low" from Carousel. (“I’m a hard, hard worker, I’m workin’ ev’ry day,” they sing. “I’m a hard, hard worker, and I’m savin’ all my pay.”)
Swept Away | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid
Then everything goes to hell, and Swept Away becomes far more focused and intense. Halfway through the show, gusts of wind are piped into the theater; the characters’ world is dramatically upended—along with the ropes and planks of Rachel Hauck’s effective set—and they find themselves stranded on a lifeboat, clinging to life on the border between the merciless glare of the sun and the fathomless dark of the ocean. (Kevin Adams’s lighting captures both.) They have survived a ship’s destruction, but as they drift in a circle, with neither food nor water, they find it harder and harder to resist the wrack’s moral undertow. “Mama’s cooking something up / Serve it to us all,” sings the starved and half-mad Mate, the voices of drowned men echoing in his head. “Satan’s ringing in now and I gotta take the call.”
As the telephone imagery in that lyric suggests, the specifics of the Avett Brothers’ songs are not always period-appropriate. That’s not a problem in the overall sound of the show; the Avetts’ variety of roots Americana seems at home in the soil of this story. The songs themselves are excellent: They’ve been arranged and orchestrated well by Chris Miller and Brian Usifer, and are played appealingly by an eight-person band led by Will Van Dyke; amd they are sung persuasively, especially by Enscoe, who is part of a indie trio called Bandits on the Run. Yet as in most jukebox musicals, there’s a sense of disconnect between the story and the score. Sometimes, the uses to which the songs are put seem too literal (“There is a sea, and I am a captain,” sings the Captain); sometimes, the songs seem too vague for dramatic purposes.
Mayer has previously worked with Gallagher on Spring Awakening and American Idiot and with Sands on the latter. Both actors give laudably committed performances in opposite roles: Gallagher as the incorrigible ne’er-do-well whose body seems to forget what it’s like to be sober, and Sands as the model of rectitude. While I admire Swept Away’s sincerity, however, I must admit that I was not ultimately very moved by it. The Avett Brothers’ voice is richly conflicted and specific, but the characters in this show are not; they are generic in their typology, and the story doesn’t quite support the framing of Mate’s deathbed confession and conversion to spreading the truth. Swept Away made me want to listen to more songs by the Avett Brothers, but I wasn’t sold on its larger points about brotherhood. Mate's redemption seems too shaky a landing for such a grim trip of guilt.
Swept Away. Longacre Theatre (Broadway). Book by John Logan. Music and lyrics by the Avett Brothers. Directed by Michael Mayer. With John Gallagher Jr., Stark Sands, Adrian Blake Enscoe, Wayne Duvall. Running time: 1hr 30mins. No intermission.
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Swept Away | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid