If you know the tale of the yacht Mignonette, or the Avett Brothers album of the same name, you’ll guess from the first moments of “Swept Away,” a Broadway musical based on both, where the horrific story is headed. But you may not guess how spectacularly it gets there.
The Mignonette was wrecked at sea on July 5, 1884, en route to Sydney from Southampton, England. Its captain, two crewmen and cabin boy survived on a lifeboat for about 20 days until, facing death from starvation, some of them made one of them their unfortunate salvation.
Though drawing most of its songs and themes from that 2004 album, the musical, which opened Tuesday at the Longacre Theater, leaves the specifics of the Mignonette behind. Instead of a small pleasure boat, its vessel is a 300-ton triple-masted whaler. It is American, not English, sailing from New Bedford, Mass. Its captain commands a much larger crew: in Michael Mayer’s literally overwhelming production, 15 Broadway-hardy men.
Among them, the Mate (John Gallagher Jr.) has the most experience of filthy life below decks and depravity on solid ground. At the opposite end of the scale of innocence, a teenager called Little Brother (Adrian Blake Enscoe) has run away from his family’s farm for excitement and adventure. Hot on his tail, Big Brother (Stark Sands) arrives in New Bedford to drag him home, away from impiety, but gets stuck aboard as the ship heaves off.
If it were not already plain from a ghostly prologue that they are all doomed, the Captain (Wayne Duvall) sees portents almost immediately in the sea’s phosphorescence. This is, he says, his last voyage, as both he, the ship and the whaling industry are failing. You can take that theologically too: How will we face our own last voyages? That the characters are identified by titles rather than names suggests the show’s morality-tale ambitions.
Those ambitions are a bit grand, and the book, by John Logan, seems to struggle as well with the size of the material. Fleshing out the intimate album, he has padded the plot with dialogue that too often feels synthetic. The themes are overdrawn, the four main characters too neatly representing four poles of humanity. And as if the story weren’t enough by itself, that prologue, set in a charity ward 22 years after the main action, features the Hamiltonesque specters of dead shipmates urging the dying Mate to “tell our story.” Was he not going to otherwise?
But there’s no denying that, once it gets going, the structure, unlike the ship’s, is sturdy. The first half of the 95-minute show swiftly introduces the setting, ignites the conflicts and, most important, provides plausible occasions for marvelous songs from the “Mignonette” album.
The Avett Brothers trio — of whom only two are actually brothers — write in a rootsy Americana style that suits the milieu well. Their chanteys, stomps and lullabies are rousing and soothing and subtly placed, never seeming shoehorned as in most jukebox musicals.
Indeed, the only purpose-built number, “Lord Lay Your Hand on My Shoulder,” is integrated so perfectly you won’t be able to detect that it’s new. Sung by Big Brother as a prayer and protest when none of the heathenish sailors will join him in Sunday observance, it is ingeniously combined with the pre-existing “Ain’t No Man,” the Mate’s cynical anti-credo of freedom at all costs: “There ain’t no man can save me / There ain’t no man can enslave me.”
That’s the way you create thematic contrast in a musical: with music. Less so, in this case, with lyrics, which are pleasant but usually too generic to characterize the singers specifically and too abstract to push the action forward.
Then, halfway through, the sea takes care of that. When the ship hits the fated storm, the temperature and tempo shift drastically, if only for a few minutes. In a collaborative coup de théâtre involving lighting (by Kevin Adams), sound (by John Shivers) and even wind in the audience (I have no idea who did that), Rachel Hauck’s astonishing ship, formerly so solid and stately, heaves upward almost to the vertical and sinks. You may feel as if you are on it.
But as the lifeboat revealed beneath its hull bobs becalmed for the next six then 16 then 21 days, the story of the four survivors falls into a similar torpor. Parched, sunburned and increasingly ravenous, in sweaty tatters by Susan Hilferty, they argue, reminisce, languish and dream of loved ones, all the while re-enacting the show’s central conflict between selfishness and sacrifice. The lifeboat turns and turns. Rain bursts then retreats. We know where this will lead — we have seen the Mate’s knife; the only question is when.
Actually, Logan provides a fine twist, but it’s nevertheless worth asking whether a desperate tale like this, with its extreme resolution, is really as relevant to regular life as the musical clearly intends. Does it have something to say about the predatory organization of society, like “Sweeney Todd,” with which it shares certain ingredients? Does it speak to human hubris like “Titanic,” with which it shares others?
I was not convinced, and yet I was fully entertained and harrowed. Mayer’s staging is exemplary, keeping the action varied and supple in limited spaces (choreography by David Neumann) and creating gorgeous images that obviate pages of dialogue. (I’m unlikely ever to forget one involving the aftermath of the shipwreck.) The individual and choral singing and playing (music supervision by Brian Usifer; arrangements and orchestrations by Usifer and Chris Miller) are superb.
And though the leading actors are exactly what they need to be — Sands shining and stalwart as Big Brother, Enscoe instantly appealing as the boy, Duvall a shell of a man as the Captain — Gallagher, as the Mate, given the chance to create a huge and complicated character, grabs it hungrily. Bothering a janky tooth, wiggling around like a worm, he is twinkly, seedy, charming, lost. It’s the kind of performance that great musicals require and that can make merely good ones riveting.
You may nevertheless want to ask yourself whether a show whose sound effects include amplified vomit is right for you. For all its hornpipes and full-throated song, its visual panache and masculine eye candy, “Swept Away,” is among the darkest, most unsparing musicals ever to anchor itself on Broadway. And despite the suggestion of rapture in its title, it is really about the gravest decisions humans can make, the depths of souls that are darker than the sea’s.
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