Wayne Duvall, John Gallagher, Jr., Stark Sands, and Adrian Blake Enscoe in Swept Away. Photo: Emilio Madrid

The story told in the new musical Swept Away has its roots in the real 1884 shipwreck of the Mignonette, a yacht that sank off the coast of West Africa en route from England to Australia. The story of the wreck was then told in a 2001 nonfiction book The Custom of the Sea, from which the Americana/folk/rock band the Avett Brothers took inspiration for their 2004 album Mignonette, Now, twenty years later, the album has inspired a Broadway musical–with a good detour through Moby Dick on the way, as the small private yacht with its four-man crew has become a whaling ship, wrecked in a storm with four survivors. The dilemma (spoiler alert) faced by the crew members is the same, though: What is a man capable of, in the most grueling conditions he will ever face, to save his own life? Does the survival of many outweigh the life of one?

With all the layers of narrative underlying Swept Away, it’s a little surprising that it falls so neatly into certain traps of the concept-album jukebox musical. True, book writer John Logan was given free rein with the Avett Brothers’ full catalog and the show does include several songs from other records–as well as one new tune composed for the musical. Even so, Logan and director Michael Mayer haven’t really cracked the central problem: It’s very hard to translate a non-narrative album into coherent dramaturgy and a set of distinguishable characters, and maybe even harder to map . Illinoise, Jagged Little Pill, even to an extent American Idiot–which was at least conceived in the vein of a rock opera–suffered from the same struggle to make the songs make sense in a new context. (The connection to American Idiot, in particular, is strong: Mayer directed Idiot and co-wrote its book with Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, and both Stark Sands and John Gallagher, Jr., two of the four leads here, starred in Idiot on Broadway.) 

Illinoise filled that gap with dance and lush orchestrations, making only faint gestures at plot and no attempt to put the songs into characters’ mouths; Jagged Little Pill went the other way, stuffing every turn with another narrative twist, making every character a roiling ball of angst to fit the songs’ oversize emotions. American Idiot used its in-your-face swagger and the contemporary relevance of its themes as its hook. Swept Away tries to treat the underlying material as a parable, explicitly relying on archetype rather than character, leaning on the story’s darkness and its stark simplicity: three plot beats building up to a terrible decision. It doesn’t matter who these people are, it seems to be saying; what matters is the choice they made in this moment of extremis. 

It’s a noble effort, but the whole thing still ends up feeling thin and abstract. We have roles, not people: the Mate (Gallagher), the Captain (Wayne Duvall), and a pair of brothers, Big (Sands) and Little (Adrian Blake Enscoe). And while I see what Logan and Mayer might have envisioned in making their central vessel a whaling ship–the pangs of a dying industry; the chance to show a full crew in all its camaraderie; the manly violence of the hunt–I’m not sure the comparison to Moby Dick does Swept Away any favors. This Captain staring down his last voyage can’t hold a candle to Ahab’s burning madness; the brothers and the Mate don’t have much of the rich interiority of the Pequod’s crew. 

We begin at the end: the Mate is dying on a tuberculosis ward, haunted by the ghosts of his shipmates, begging him to tell their story in full once before he passes. (You would believe, from this, that the Mate alone survives the wreck, but the truth is a bit more complicated.) And from there, we jump to New Bedford, and the departure of the fated voyage. The Mate, a rootless seaman with disdain for God and enough cynicism to float the whole crew, arrives to meet his new Captain, a gruff fellow on his last voyage before his ship is decommissioned as the whaling industry winds down. But they’re short one crew member, who arrives at the last minute: Little Brother is seeking some adventure before he returns to the family farm and marries his sweetheart. Trailing him is Big Brother, following to bring him home, but arriving so late that the ship sets sail while he’s still arguing with Little, and now they’re both sailors.

The show cleaves neatly in two: The first few days of the voyage are busy with activity, filled with a crew of dancing fellows (choreography by David Neumann), with Little Brother’s lighthearted awe at all he sees, and Big Brother’s attempts to share his pious faith with a crew of uninterested sailors. The Avett Brothers’ tunes, with hints of sea chanteys and hymns, and the rhythms of American folk songs, fare well here.

The wreck itself is but a gesture in sound and light, and then we’re in a lifeboat with only our survivors. Mayer and Rachel Hauck’s set build the contrast out admirably; we shift in an instant from a lively, fully populated deck, with sailors scampering up the rigging and moving around barrels and harpoons, to a bare stage with just a drifting lifeboat. The voices of the rest of the crew fill in and their ghosts haunt the periphery, but the second half of the show is just those four men, up close and marooned in the center of the stage. 

And it’s here that you start to feel the strain. The songs start to fare less well when they need to belong to individual characters, especially for the Mate, who’s given a gory and violent backstory that comes out of nowhere, on the back of a song that seems to shift a little too far toward modern rock. Each basically gets one character trait: the mantle of leadership for the captain; righteousness for Big Brother; innocence for Little. Enscoe and Sands bring beautiful vocal qualities to the brothers. Enscoe’s Little Brother comes off as a bit too innocent to have even figured out how to run away to sea, but his sweetness and his joy at life’s new discoveries feel genuine. Stark’s Big Brother is righteous and unbending; his posture feels rigid and contained compared to Enscoe’s exuberant romping. Even in the lifeboat, where there’s barely any room to move, you can feel his containment. Gallagher has the hardest job, once the Mate’s character does an abrupt about-face into evil on the lifeboat. 

His Mate also uses a bizarre accent that puzzled me throughout–and even more so when he later mentions being from Vermont. And there are other small notes that bothered me even in the simple plot. The brothers end up in New Bedford from somewhere presumably not all that far away, or surely Little would have noticed Big following him–and yet, in the final confrontation, Big doesn’t want a “yankee” touching his brother. These are small details, but they contribute to the sense that the humans in this piece weren’t well thought through. 

In the end, while I was impressed by the show’s commitment to facing the darkness of the final, brutal decision that the survivors need to make, I was mildly surprised, rather than emotionally walloped, by the event itself. The Mate may be haunted by the outcome for the rest of his life–which is a little odd, if he was really the hardened killer he reveals on the lifeboat–but I didn’t feel the punch.