When a violent storm sinks their whaling ship off the coast of New Bedford, Mass., the four survivors face a reckoning: how far will they go to stay alive? And can they live with the consequences? With music and lyrics from The Avett Brothers (“America’s Biggest Roots Band,” Rolling Stone), whose 2004 “Mignonette” was inspired by an 1884 shipwreck and the struggle of four men to survive, SWEPT AWAY is an electrifying, soul-stirring new musical exploring how facing tragedy can open the door to forgiveness… if only we’ll let it.
If truly dark musicals are not your taste, I’d suggesting staying away from “Swept Away.” Others are urged to come sail away on this often-remarkable journey.
In turning the Avett Brothers’ take on this gruesome true story into a musical, Logan and director Michael Mayer were facing a strangely paradoxical task. On the one hand, the events are there, the songs are there, and the central characters and situations are just waiting to be brought to three-dimensional life. Conversely, that very straightforwardness is a potential trap. A piece of theater assembled from preexisting songs, or charting a known historical event, can wind up feeling by-the-numbers: The things we expect to happen happen, and along the way folks sing about them (or, more likely, they sing about slightly generalized circumstances adjacent to the specific ones onstage). Despite its creative team’s efforts to lace a capital-T Theme through the work, Swept Away often falls prey to this roteness. Logan, with the support of Scott and Seth Avett and their bandmate Bob Crawford, has chosen “salvation and redemption” as the play’s big idea, but its deployment is telly not showy — we hear a lot about it, but our pulses never really rise with the stakes.
2020 | Regional (US) |
Berkeley Rep World Premiere Regional (US) |
2024 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
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