‘Swept Away’ Review: John Gallagher Jr. Steers A Stirring Avett Brothers Seafaring Musical
deadline.comAs 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.
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