The Avett Brothers of Concord, North Carolina, are cool dudes — listen to their eclectic music and you’ll hear the influences of rock, Americana, emo, folk and bluegrass. They have fans all over the place but their so-called “punk grass” sound is especially beloved by Appalachian hipsters who flock to the hundreds of live shows Scott and Seth Avett play out each year.
And it’s not just the musical sound, either. The Bros. Avett are narrative lyricists inclined toward throbbing, epic imagery.
“Will I join with the ocean blue?,” they wrote. “Or run into a savior true?”
Good question.
“When the jealousy fades away,” they lamented. “And it’s ash and dust for cash and lust.”
Even though Broadway does not typically pull the core Avett Brothers audience, their songs are interesting fodder for a jukebox musical. Hence the arrival of “Swept Away” at the Longacre Theatre, a new work by the gutsy John Logan that draws from the Avett Brothers’ catalog and tells a seafaring tale taking place at the moment when paraffin and kerosene were dealing a fatal blow to the storied whaling industry that once sent lonely seafarers perilously hurtling all over the world’s oceans, seeking blubber, if hardly Moby-Dick.
“Swept Away,” which is just 90 minutes long, is directed by Michael Mayer, features an all-male cast led by John Gallagher Jr., Stark Sands, Adrian Blake Enscoe and Wayne Duvall, and is an unusual Broadway show.
In the first half, we meet a disillusioned captain (Duvall) whose whaling ship is headed for the wrecking yard. (Logan, who also wrote “The Last Ship” with Sting, long has been fascinated by naval stories, especially those of decline and reinvention.) The crusty captain’s crew contains a poetic adventurer (Gallagher) but also two brothers of contrasting personalities but palpable connection (Sands and Enscoe) whose presence adds a mystical element and, of course, echoes a body of music created by brothers who often discussed their relationship through song.
But then the ship capsizes (fabulously so, thanks to set designer Rachel Hauck), the ensemble of sailors mostly disappears and we lurch from metaphors of blue-collar workers thrown suddenly onto the scrapheap of seismic change to a scenario of four men lost at sea on a lifeboat, starving under a punishing sun and wondering how their need for individual survival clashes with ethical behavior.
At that point, the troubles of the whaling industry, clearly intended here to serve as a metaphor for the rise of artificial intelligence and other such distressing contemporary phenomena, are subsumed by matters more primal. It is, to be honest, a shift that leads this to feel a lot like two different short musicals, spliced together.
I’m a fan of the Avett Brothers and if you similarly like their music, you’ll appreciate how it sounds here under the music direction of Will Van Dyke; some of the harmonics are very beautiful and Gallagher, especially, brings the right kind of live, in-the-moment vocal tension to this most distinctive of song catalogs. But a lot of this music is about romantic love and since it is here inserted into an all-male nautical environment, those songs inevitably get confined to scenarios of absence and regret, which proves limiting, given that so many of them herald the powers of a deep romantic love to save a soul or two.
Granted, the story is rooted in “Mignonette,” a killer 2004 Avett Brothers album about an Australia-bound yacht that capsized in 1884, leaving a kind of “Survivors” scenario in which four crew members were trapped with each other for weeks in a lifeboat and turned to drastic measures to ensure their at least partial survival. Music from that album courses through the show and is most effective. But the whaling scenario is an addition and it inevitably adds a hefty heaviness to a soundscape that could have used more chronological fluidity. And, I swear, a woman or three.
I suspect “Swept Away” will end up as the most niche of this fall’s armada of Broadway musicals; it’s an unusual, all-male piece that doesn’t offer obvious commercial appeal, especially given its dire theme for a big Broadway night out. But it strikes me as a weird, sure, but also daring interpretation of a kind of music we only rarely hear on Broadway.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
At the Longacre Theatre, 220 W. 48th St, New York; sweptawaymusical.com
