“Swept Away,” a new musical featuring songs by the Americana band the Avett Brothers, is planning to open on Broadway this fall, following productions in California and Washington.
The musical is inspired by a once-famous shipwreck: In 1884, a British yacht called the Mignonette was wrecked at sea, and the four-man crew’s desperate efforts to survive, which included cannibalism, led to a protracted and influential legal battle. The details of the ordeal have been changed for “Swept Away,” which is set in 1888 on a whaling ship off the coast of New Bedford, Mass.
Much of the musical’s score is drawn from “Mignonette,” a 2004 Avett Brothers album inspired by the shipwreck. But the score also includes songs from four other Avett Brothers albums and an original song the band wrote for the stage show.
The band announced that the musical would be coming to Broadway during a concert on Friday night at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens. Some of the actors who have performed in previous iterations of the show joined them onstage.
The musical features a book by John Logan, who won a Tony Award for writing “Red.” The director is Michael Mayer, who won a Tony for directing “Spring Awakening.”
The show has had two previous productions, in 2022 at Berkeley Repertory Theater in California, and last winter at Arena Stage in Washington. Thomas Floyd, a critic for The Washington Post, called it “transfixing” and said “this morality tale launches with toe-tapping propulsion before anchoring for an intimate elegy on grief and guilt.”
A spokesman said the musical would open this fall at a Shubert theater, but said the production was not ready to confirm the specific timing or location. The principal actors from the previous productions — John Gallagher Jr., Stark Sands, Adrian Blake Enscoe and Wayne Duvall — joined the Avett Brothers onstage Friday night, and were introduced as “the cast of the soon-to-be-officially Broadway show.”
The Broadway run will be produced by Matthew Masten, Sean Hudock, and Madison Wells Live (founded by Gigi Pritzker, a billionaire film producer).
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