In the 1880s, a yacht sank off South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. The few survivors resorted to cannibalism before their rescue.
That grisly tale might seem an unlikely theme upon which to build a concept album, but Seth Avett saw something deeper in the story’s themes. “The truth-telling aspect of the story was intriguing to us,” he explains. “It’s intrinsically sewn into the idea of songwriting, and of making things that you can feel good about sharing over and over again.”
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The Avett Brothers—Seth and his brother Scott—were inspired by the story, which would eventually become their third studio LP, the 2004 concept album Mignonette.
Bob Crawford, Scott Avett and Seth Avett of The Avett Brothers and the cast perform during the opening night curtain call for the new Avett Brothers musical “Swept Away” on Broadway at The Longacre Theatre on November 19, 2024 in New York City. (Credit: Bruce Glikas/Getty Images)
As Scott explains, it didn’t start that way. “We were going to make an album one way or the other,” he says. Seth emphasizes that in his view, all of the Avett Brothers albums are conceptual. “And we’re the concept,” he says. “The songs that Scott and I write are autobiographical in nature, but they also speak on the human experience.”
The Avett Brothers come from a musical family tradition. Growing up near metropolitan Charlotte in Concord, North Carolina, the Avetts got into music early. By the time they reached high school, Seth (guitar) and Scott (banjo) had teamed up. The rock music (with a punk edge and attitude) they had been playing informed their collaborative venture, but the music of the Avett Brothers drew as much from traditional forms like bluegrass and country. Their synthesis of those styles resulted in something unique.
By 2001, Bob Crawford had joined on bass (though all members play multiple instruments and sing). With those three as the core of the group, the Avett Brothers made a self-released live album. That release caught the public’s attention; it also drew the attention of Dolph Ramseur, head of Ramseur Records. The Avett Brothers signed with the label and released their studio debut, Country Was in 2002.
Scott believes that the act of making a conceptual work is creatively liberating. “It gives the artist permission to break out of the boundaries of what they think of as songs,” he says. The storytelling and dialogical quality built into the bluegrass tradition lent itself brilliantly to the Avetts’ narrative songs. Mignonette was a critical smash.
At the time, the album was merely one of a long string of acclaimed releases from the band. By 2020, the Avett Brothers had 10 studio sets and four live albums to their credit; the songs from Mignonette were now a small part of a large and beloved body of work.
That changed in 2014, when Matthew Masten—associate producer of a 2014 Broadway adaptation of John Steinbeck’s classic Of Mice and Men—approached the group with the idea of making a musical based on their then decade-old album. Musical productions with cannibalism as part of the story line are uncommon but not without precedent: years before creating South Park, writers Matt Parker and Trey Stone created a stage production called Cannibal! The Musical. But that was a comedy; what Masten had in mind was something far more thoughtful and serious.
Scott says that he and his band mates had no doubts about the validity of the idea. “We were excited,” Seth agrees. “We thought, ‘Hey, maybe this could happen.’” They emphasize that playwright and screenwriter John Logan (Gladiator, Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the James Bond films Skyfall and Spectre) was a major source of dedication and inspiration.
Logan’s book for the stage production used Mignonette as a springboard, but he drew from the group’s catalog for songs that would help tell the show’s story. In the end, five songs from that record would find their way into Swept Away; eight other tunes draw from four other albums, and the group composed one new song (“Lord Lay Your Hand On My Shoulder”) expressly for the stage show.
A member of the crew of the Mignonette using a sea anchor in an open boat during stormy conditions at sea. This is an original engraving by J Nash after sketches by Edwin Stephens, a crew member of the Mignonette. (Credit: Rischgitz/Getty Images)
In Logan’s hands, Swept Away is a morality tale with religious (or quasi-religious) themes of salvation at its core. “We were [pleasantly] surprised at how on-the-mark John was about concepts that are very alive in our own dialogue,” says Seth. “The brotherhood—the relational nuances—are spot-on,” Scott adds.
The 90-minute production is split roughly in half; the first part features the four main characters (each referred to in generic terms—Big Brother, Little Brother, Captain, Mate—rather than by name) plus a spirited ensemble of crew members aboard a whaling boat that sets sail from New Bedford, Massachusetts. The music hews fairly closely to the Avett Brothers’ original arrangements, with lyrical and instrumental adjustments made to accommodate the vocal-forward nature of a stage production.
Occasionally, the songs take an anachronistic turn. With its back-and-forth shift between bluegrass and rock, “Ain’t No Man / Lord Lay Your Hand” recalls the Charlie Daniels Band’s similarly-themed 1979 single “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” But largely, the music remains true to the spirit of a story set nearly 150 years ago.
Swept Away premiered in 2022 with performances in Berkeley, California; since then the show has traveled to Washington, D.C., with no changes to the cast’s core lineup. Actor-singer Stark Sands (Big Brother) notes that the cast has mounted 128 productions. “And that was before we started on Broadway,” he adds. Three weeks of preview performances for the seasoned cast came ahead of Swept Away’s Broadway premiere on November 19 at Manhattan’s Longacre Theatre.
Bob Crawford suggests that the show’s inventive set is almost a fifth main character. “It speaks with incredible boldness,” he says. (Details on what he means are best discovered when seeing the performance.) But beyond the scenery and the Avett Brothers’ rousing music, the true stars of the show are the four actor-singers leading the all-male cast. Wayne Duvall (Captain) develops his role beyond what Logan’s book provides for it. “My character goes from melancholy to despair to death,” he says. “It’s a deep freakin’ show, man. It tackles so many different [topics] for each one of us, separately and together.”
John Gallagher Jr.’s Mate is the lead among equals in Swept Away. “It’s quite vocally demanding,” he says. “And it takes a real emotional toll to live through [the story] eight times a week.” Sands emphasizes that all of the major roles—his included—require the actors to “go to some really dark places mentally, but there’s redemption. We get lifted up at the end of the show.”
(L-R) Wayne Duvall, Stark Sands, John Gallagher Jr., Director Michael Mayer and Adrian Blake Enscoe during the opening night for ‘Swept Away.’ Credit: Bruce Glikas/Getty Images)
Adrian Enscoe (Little Brother) admits that “what happens in the show is quite traumatic, but it leaves you with a sense of hope.” Enscoe laughs while explaining that there are other theater works that seek to disturb the audience. “You go home, your stomach is turning: ‘What the hell did I just see!?’” The actor says that Swept Away is different. “The show puts you through a catharsis,” Enscoe concedes. “When people come out afterward, it’s like they’ve just had a religious experience. And that’s how it feels for us on stage, too.”
The expert staging and inventive set work serve to add to the emotional intensity of the story adapted from the Avett Brothers’ adaptation of a real-life tragedy. But the tale twice removed still holds great power. “I want people to be in that little boat with us,” says Duvall. “I want them to forget that they’re sitting in a theater, and to come away with whatever they truly need or feel.”
“We’re all in this together,” says Adrian Enscoe, referring as much to the cast as to humanity as a whole. “The poetry of being on this boat fits into the larger world: you never know what adversity is around the corner. The only thing that we have in this world is each other; we have to rely on each other existentially to pull through our darkest moments.”
Gallagher observes that any theater staging is a leap of faith. “And that’s true for each of our characters,” he says. “There’s a massive leap of faith that everyone has to take at some point in the show. You just hope you’ll land somewhere soft. And my hope is that every audience member takes the same risk: to jump as if they’ll be caught.” “My wish,” says Sands, “is that people would walk away from the show with an appreciation for their own lives, for the people that they love. And I think Swept Away has the ability to do that.”
The Avett Brothers are pleased with how Swept Away has taken on a life of its own beyond their music. “I love how high the highs get, how low the lows get,” Scott Avett says. “There’s a great element of dynamism in Swept Away; that’s something that we’re attempting in our own shows—and in our everyday lives—as well.”
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