In the early days of the 21st century, before the Top 5 albums and the three Grammy nominations, the Avett Brothers were a band of three young guys, relentlessly touring their blend of folk-rock-country, sprinting from show to show in their van. Between gigs, Scott Avett’s father gave him a copy of “The Custom of the Sea,” Neil Hanson’s book chronicling the 19th-century wreck of the Mignonette, a British yacht, and its tragic aftermath.
On the road, Scott would recap the pages he had read, to his brother Seth and their bandmate Bob Crawford. They eventually decided that the harrowing survival story of these crewmen, stranded off the Cape of Good Hope on the South African coast, would be the foundation for their second studio album. It was released in 2004, and they titled it “Mignonette.”
Over the next few years, the Avett Brothers were selling out arenas, their style of Americana, including emotionally probing lyrics, establishing them as stars in the genre. And then, one day about a decade after “Mignonette” came out, they received a curious call: A young theater producer named Matthew Masten asked if they would be interested in having the album adapted for a stage musical.
“It sounded like a good idea,” said Scott Avett, who sings and plays guitar and banjo in the group. “But ideas are a dime a dozen, and a very small percentage of them seem to happen.”
It took another decade, numerous stops and starts, and several regional productions of this unlikely story, but the new musical “Swept Away” has finally reached Broadway. It opens on Nov. 19 at the Longacre Theater.
For a few years after Masten’s call, the Avetts would hear from him sporadically (Scott described those interactions as “a fluttering”). The producer, though, was gradually putting the pieces together, enlisting the Tony-winning playwright and screenwriter John Logan, who agreed to come on board on the condition that he could use additional songs from the Avett Brothers’ catalog.
The actual Mignonette set sail from England in May 1884. After about six weeks at sea, the ship was sunk by a giant wave. The captain and three crew members escaped in a dinghy and spent 19 days adrift without food or water before having to face existential questions about what they needed to do to survive — and what they did turned out to be extreme.
Logan created a taut, uninterrupted 90-minute narrative around four archetypal, fully drawn crewmen: the Captain, the Mate, Big Brother and Little Brother. Inspired by the Avetts’ distinctly American sound, he shifted the setting to a whaling expedition based out of New England. Logan, who had written the book for “Moulin Rouge!,” among other productions, and was a writer of the films “Skyfall” and “Gladiator,” said he was interested in a project that was “deeply American.”
He was also familiar with parts of the tale’s setting. “My father was a naval architect,” he said. “I grew up in port cities — I know my way around a ship.”
The bandmates didn’t have much experience with stage musicals (growing up in rural North Carolina, Scott said, the “Jesus Christ Superstar” movie was as close as they got), but they were won over by Logan’s pitch. “When John told us the story, the depth and the humanness convinced us,” Scott said.
Logan said they were very supportive. “They immediately understood this was a story about salvation and redemption, and it dealt with theological themes in a very direct way,” he said. “We weren’t hiding behind anything, and I think they appreciated that.”
Bob Crawford, the band’s bassist, responded to the universality Logan mined in his juxtaposition of the band’s songs. “These moral touchstones are as much biblical as they are Aesop’s Fables as they are all of great literature,” he said.
Next, Masten, the producer, turned his attention to the Tony-winning director Michael Mayer, who had adapted another pop album, Green Day’s “American Idiot,” for the stage.
“John had come up with this very economical, epic musical,” Mayer said. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is like a Melville or a Hawthorne short story,’ but it had a very modern energy. There was something wild about how huge the themes were and how compact it was.”
Mayer had a requirement of his own: He insisted that John Gallagher Jr., an actor and musician with whom he had worked on “Spring Awakening” and “American Idiot” — and who first introduced him to the Avett Brothers’ music — be part of the production.
Gallagher, who calls himself a die-hard fan of the band, took on the role of the Mate, the slippery figure at the center of the show. “I followed them around the East Coast through my mid-20s and here I am at 40, and it bowls me over that songs that have meant so much to me in another context now are a day-to-day part of my professional life,” he said.
As “Swept Away” developed (the title is from a song on “Mignonette”), including a spectacular staging of the wreck and new orchestrations and arrangements by Brian Usifer and Chris Miller, the Avett Brothers went through what they all described as “an exercise in letting go,” while also remaining available for input.
“We were kept informed, and we always had the freedom to be as involved as we wanted to be,” said Seth Avett, the band’s guitarist and vocalist. “It was right for us to have some say in things, but we’re also stepping into a room that we’re not familiar with.” (At Logan’s request, the band wrote a new song for the show, to nail down a key dramatic moment.)
The production was booked into the Berkeley Repertory Theater in California for 2020, but then, of course, the world shut down. A year and a half later, it finally opened, in January 2022, this time coinciding with a coronavirus surge.
“A show that was sold out before we ever had a single performance ended up being largely empty because people were afraid to come out of their houses,” Mayer, the director, recalled. “Everyone in the show got Covid. We had to cancel performances. We had actors in masks during performances. The show was great but very few people saw it, and it looked like that might have been the end of the road.”
Gallagher, though, said that he is grateful for what they had to endure in Berkeley. “We really clung to each other desperately,” he said. “For four months, we were living in this empty Residence Inn, and we only had each other and the piece, so it mirrored the story, to some extent. We really felt like our lives depended on one another.”
“Swept Away” was eventually offered a slot at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., where it opened in late 2023. This time, Mayer said that he would continue only if the four lead actors stayed in their roles: Gallagher as the Mate, Stark Sands as the pious Big Brother, Adrian Blake Enscoe playing the thrill-seeking Little Brother and Wayne Duvall as the stoic, aging Captain.
That loyalty is indicative of the unified vision that everyone involved says has defined the show’s development. “This was probably the most cohesive production I’ve ever been involved with,” Logan said. “We all knew where we were going and the best way to get there, and all the artists involved brought the best of themselves to telling the same story.”
The Arena Stage production was the first time the Avett Brothers saw “Swept Away” in full. “My wife was sitting beside me,” Seth said, “and she told me that she looked over at me and I was smiling in a way she’d never seen me smile.
“I knew the story was cool, and I could see the potential,” he continued, “but I don’t think that, deep down, I really believed that the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle could be so radically resituated and make so much sense as a new narrative through the words that Scott and I had written about our own lives. It just didn’t seem possible.”
At its climax, as with the real-life shipwreck, “Swept Away” turns brutally dark — certainly more traumatic than many Broadway audiences are used to. The principals never considered watering the story down, pointing to stage works like “King Lear” and “Sweeney Todd” as productions that are unafraid of challenging theatergoers.
“Is ‘Medea’ really about a woman who kills her children to revenge herself against her husband’s infidelity?” Mayer said. “That’s the plot, but it’s not the story. Yes, this plot is about four people lost at sea who have to make a terrible decision and survive. But the story is about what it is to be a human being faced with a terrible choice. Where is your moral compass? What would you do in order to survive in any context? And that question is what the theater is made for. That’s catharsis.”
For Gallagher, the intensity of “Swept Away” relates directly to the Avett Brothers shows he saw when he, and they, were much younger. “They were breaking banjo strings and sweating, and Seth was losing his voice because he was screaming so hard, and it was like, these guys are going to die onstage tonight,” he said. “It feels like we’d be doing them a disservice if we didn’t do the same thing with this show every night.”
For a band who never expected to hear their songs on a Broadway stage, what’s striking is that the lengthy process didn’t dilute the essence of what first drew them to the tale of a horrible disaster at sea. “The whole concept of ‘Mignonette’ was commitment to truth,” Scott said, “because they hung themselves on truth when they were rescued. That was always the heart of the story. That’s all that mattered to me. And that’s all still in there.”
“A lot about this show is destiny,” he added. “We are not driving it — we’ve just been witnessing it, watching this thing happen. And it’s a miracle that it works so well.”
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