John Gallagher Jr. Steers Avett Brothers Musical

As enthralling as it’s disquieting, Swept Away, opening tonight on Broadway, is a taut and charming new folks musical that includes the beautiful songs of the roots-rock group The Avett Brothers and an impeccable forged headed by John Gallagher Jr. and Stark Sands.

Primarily based on the Avetts’ beautiful 2004 album Mignonette, Swept Away isn’t a lot a jukebox musical because the pleased results of a retconning: The place Mignonette loosely chronicled the true story of an English yacht that sank within the Eighties off the Cape of Good Hope, leaving a crew of 4 stranded on a lifeboat, Swept Away, with its compelling guide by John Logan and exact path by Michael Mayer, strikes the locale to the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts. The yacht is now a whaling ship within the dying days of that trade.

The plot is as lean as a folks ballad, and established swiftly: Because the viewers enters the theater, it’s confronted with what seems to be a person – a corpse? a dummy? – on stage mendacity on a sick-bed cot. When the lights go down, the person (John Gallagher Jr.) stirs and we come to grasp that he’s dying in a tuberculous ward for the indigent, early 1900s.

Inside minutes, the person is joined by three males – the greenish lighting on them indicators they aren’t of this world, or at the least of this time – who beseech the dying man to lastly inform their story, and forgive himself.

Forgive himself for what? Keep tuned.

Because the time flashes again to 1888, we watch that story unfold on a fantastically, if minimally, rendered ship, (scenic design by Rachel Hauck) with masts and ropes and wooden that you may virtually hear creaking. Gallagher performs Mate – the absence of correct names provides the musical the universality of a folks track – who genially greets and provides orders to ensemble of grizzled sailor-whalers setting off for the open sea. Amongst them: the late-arriving however hopelessly enthusiastic Little Brother (Adrian Blake Enscoe, Swept Away‘s nice discovery) who sings of forsaking his household and true like to expertise life he’d by no means see again on the farm.

Sizzling on Little Brother’s heels is Massive Brother (Sands), decided to deliver his impulsive youthful sibling again to the farm. Whereas the brothers argue on board, the ship units sail, making sailors of them each.

The primary part of this 90-minute, intermissionless musical depicts the preliminary camaraderie and arduous work of the whaling life (the advantageous, roots-rock and alt-folk songs “Ain’t No Man,” “Go To Sleep,” “Onerous Employee,” together with David Neumann’s exuberant clap-and-stomp choreography) whereas additionally delineating the principle characters: Little Brother’s optimism, Massive Brother’s non secular religion (“Lord Lay Your Hand On My Shoulder”) and the end-of-the-line regrets of Captain (Wayne Duvall), the aged whaler grieving over the incipient junking of his ship and his antiquated lifestyle.

Solely Mate stays one thing of a thriller, outwardly cheerful and seemingly a great distance off from the dying, haunted man we noticed on that demise mattress within the prologue. What, precisely, is his deal?

That a part of the story is ready in movement 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 advantageous coup de theatre courtesy of set designer Hauck, the ground of the ship slowly tilts upward, Titanic-like, the place it would stay for the remainder of the present, hovering above a lifeboat containing the 4 foremost characters, the opposite sailors misplaced at sea, the survivors’ garb seeming to develop as tattered as their spirits (costumes by the prolific Susan Hilferty).

From right here we go right into a Lifeboat situation, the times passing with each growing thirst, starvation and publicity, and life typically getting grimmer. Little Brother bought the worst of the storm, his physique all however crushed by a fallen mast. Most within the viewers will know the place all that is headed, although Swept Away has quite a lot of surprises in retailer, not least some revelations about one character’s earlier experiences and his lengthy, gradual march towards redemption.

The performances – each by way of performing and singing – are with out exception formidable. Reuniting with director Mayer from his Tony successful efficiency in Spring Awakening, Gallagher (successfully using a not-unpleasant sing-songy speech that sounds prefer it might be some long-lost backwoods Vermont accent) is the present’s grounding affect, his demeanor altering with the winds and successfully signifying the twists and turns of the story. Sands, so good in & Juliet and To Kill A Mockingbird, embodies the story’s ethical power with out coming throughout as off-putting or smug, whereas Duvall captures the tragedy of a person whose lengthy life has left him ill-prepared for what destiny has in retailer.

However it’s Enscoe, as Little Brother, who’s the revelation of Swept Away. In his Broadway debut, Enscoe, a member of the indie folks band Bandits on the Run, fantastically conveys how brash, youthful hope can result in locations unimagined, for higher and worse. A strong and supple singer, Enscoe’s duets with Sands (the evocative “Homicide In The Metropolis”) and Gallagher (on the present’s title track) are highlights in a musical with no scarcity of quietly devastating moments.

Title: Swept Away
Venue: Broadway’s Longacre Theatre
Director: Michael Mayer
E-book: John Logan
Music & Lyrics: The Avett Brothers
Forged: 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 embrace John Michael Finley and Robert Pendilla
Working time: 90 min (no intermission)