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As enthralling as it is disquieting, Swept Away, opening tonight on Broadway, is a taut and captivating new folk musical featuring the gorgeous songs of the roots-rock group The Avett Brothers and an impeccable cast headed by John Gallagher Jr. and Stark Sands.
Based on the Avetts’ gorgeous 2004 album Mignonette, Swept Away isn’t so much a jukebox musical as the happy result of a retconning: Where Mignonette loosely chronicled the true story of an English yacht that sank in the 1880s off the Cape of Good Hope, leaving a crew of four stranded on a lifeboat, Swept Away, with its compelling book by John Logan and precise direction by Michael Mayer, moves the locale to the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts. The yacht is now a whaling ship in the dying days of that industry.
The plot is as lean as a folk ballad, and established swiftly: As the audience enters the theater, it’s confronted with what appears to be a man – a corpse? a dummy? – on stage lying on a sick-bed cot. When the lights go down, the man (John Gallagher Jr.) stirs and we come to understand that he is dying in a tuberculous ward for the indigent, early 1900s.
Within minutes, the man is joined by three men – the greenish lighting on them signals they are not of this world, or at least of this time – who beseech the dying man to finally tell their story, and forgive himself.
Forgive himself for what? Stay tuned.
As the time flashes back to 1888, we watch that story unfold on a beautifully, if minimally, rendered ship, (scenic design by Rachel Hauck) with masts and ropes and wood that you can almost hear creaking. Gallagher plays Mate – the absence of proper names gives the musical the universality of a folk song – who genially greets and gives orders to ensemble of grizzled sailor-whalers setting off for the open sea. Among them: the late-arriving but hopelessly enthusiastic Little Brother (Adrian Blake Enscoe, Swept Away‘s great discovery) who sings of leaving behind his family and true love to experience life he’d never see back on the farm.
Hot on Little Brother’s heels is Big Brother (Sands), determined to bring his impulsive younger sibling back to the farm. While the brothers argue on board, the ship sets sail, making sailors of them both.
The first section of this 90-minute, intermissionless musical depicts the initial camaraderie and hard work of the whaling life (the fine, roots-rock and alt-folk songs “Ain’t No Man,” “Go To Sleep,” “Hard Worker,” along with David Neumann’s exuberant clap-and-stomp choreography) while also delineating the main characters: Little Brother’s optimism, Big Brother’s religious faith (“Lord Lay Your Hand On My Shoulder”) and the end-of-the-line regrets of Captain (Wayne Duvall), the elderly whaler grieving over the incipient junking of his ship and his antiquated way of life.
Only Mate remains something of a mystery, outwardly cheerful and seemingly a long way off from the dying, haunted man we saw on that death bed in the prologue. What, exactly, is his deal?
That part of the tale is set in motion with a sudden squall – chillingly rendered by thunder cracks (kudos to John Shivers’ sound design) and flashes of lightning (ditto to lighting designer Kevin Adams). In a fine coup de theatre courtesy of set designer Hauck, the floor of the ship slowly tilts upward, Titanic-like, where it will remain for the rest of the show, hovering above a lifeboat containing the four main characters, the other sailors lost at sea, the survivors’ garb seeming to grow as tattered as their spirits (costumes by the prolific Susan Hilferty).
From here we go into a Lifeboat scenario, the days passing with every increasing thirst, hunger and exposure, and life generally getting grimmer. Little Brother got the worst of the storm, his body all but crushed by a fallen mast. Most in the audience will know where all this is headed, though Swept Away has more than a few surprises in store, not least some revelations about one character’s previous experiences and his long, slow march toward redemption.
The performances – both in terms of acting and singing – are without exception formidable. Reuniting with director Mayer from his Tony winning performance in Spring Awakening, Gallagher (effectively employing a not-unpleasant sing-songy speech that sounds like it could be some long-lost backwoods Vermont accent) is the show’s grounding influence, his demeanor changing with the winds and effectively signifying the twists and turns of the tale. Sands, so good in & Juliet and To Kill A Mockingbird, embodies the story’s moral force without coming across as off-putting or smug, while Duvall captures the tragedy of a man whose long life has left him ill-prepared for what fate has in store.
But it is Enscoe, as Little Brother, who is the revelation of Swept Away. In his Broadway debut, Enscoe, a member of the indie folk band Bandits on the Run, beautifully conveys how brash, youthful hope can lead to places unimagined, for better and worse. A powerful and supple singer, Enscoe’s duets with Sands (the evocative “Murder In The City”) and Gallagher (on the show’s title song) are highlights in a musical with no shortage of quietly devastating moments.
Title: Swept Away
Venue: Broadway’s Longacre Theatre
Director: Michael Mayer
Book: John Logan
Music & Lyrics: The Avett Brothers
Cast: John Gallagher Jr., Stark Sands, Wayne Duvall and Adrian Blake Enscoe, with Josh Breckenridge, Hunter Brown, Matt DeAngelis, Cameron Johnson, Brandon Kalm, Rico LeBron, Michael J. Mainwaring, Orville Mendoza, Chase Peacock, Tyrone L. Robinson, David Rowen and John Sygar. Swings include John Michael Finley and Robert Pendilla
Running time: 90 min (no intermission)
