For Scott Avett, the bad news arrived with dinner. In early December, the co-founder of the Avett Brothers and his wife were in their favorite restaurant in Charlotte, North Carolina. Just a few weeks earlier, Swept Away — a musical based on an early Avett Brothers album that included all its songs along with others from the Americana band’s catalog — had opened on Broadway. The maître d at the place told Avett that she and her sister couldn’t wait to see it. Once Avett took a seat at his table, a fan came over and said he would be trekking to New York that weekend to catch the show.
But as he was hearing all that positive feedback, Avett received the text he’d been dreading: Swept Away would be closing, after only 32 performances. In that moment, Avett had to keep the bad news under wraps, but inside his heart plunged. “I wanted the world to see and hear it,” he says. “And I’m just sitting there thinking, ‘This really sucks.’ I had assumed it was going to be on Broadway for 20 years.”
Everything about Swept Away defied Broadway convention. The cast didn’t include any major movie or TV actors. The show was neither based on a classic film nor was a traditional jukebox musical built around the songs of a famous pop star or band. Instead, it was inspired by the Avett Brothers’ 2004 album Mignonette, based on the real-life tale of the sinking of a sailing vessel headed from England to Sydney, Australia, in 1884. Stuck in a lifeboat for nearly three weeks, the four survivors ultimately resorted to devouring one of their boatmates in order to survive.
But Swept Away had an equal number of factors in its corner, which included the Avett Brothers’ hardcore following and the involvement of talents like director Michael Mayer, who helmed Spring Awakening and the Broadway version of American Idiot. It tapped into the culture’s tasty on-again, off-again fascination with cannibalism (Yellowjackets, “Timothy” nostalgia). And much like Girl from the North Country, the musical based around familiar and unfamiliar songs from the Bob Dylan catalog, Swept Away was also seen as a potential harbinger of a new Broadway, one that would incorporate modern story-songs rather than standard showtunes.
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“Having grown up going to concerts and being a fan of singer-songwriters, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of intersecting the concert-going culture with the theater-going culture,” says co-producer Sean Hudock. “And I thought this was an opportunity to take those childhood dreams of wanting to work with rock stars and bringing them into our world and seeing the crossover in audiences. We could have folks who had never seen a musical or had never been to the theater before who were coming for the first time and being sort of blown away by this theatrical gesture.”
But in the end, Swept Away was blown away by something else: Middling ticket sales, a story that may have been unappetizing to some, a song catalog unfamiliar to the tourists who make up a large chunk of Broadway’s audience, and perhaps a bit of bad timing in terms of the national mood. “It could be worse, but working on a project for 11 years and then closing much earlier than you ever anticipated, it hurts,” Matthew Masten, a co-producer, says. “It’s a tough, tough pill to swallow.”
It was Masten who initiated the project all those years ago. Reading an article about concept albums that could potentially be the basis of musicals, the producer was particularly taken with the mention of Mignonette. “I was fascinated by the idea of being stranded at sea, and what would you do?” he says. “How far would you be willing to go to save your family members? I couldn’t get that out of my head. Part of the intrigue when I heard this concept was, can you make a darker musical?” Masten was also a fan of Sweeney Todd, the proudly gruesome musical about a murderous barber.
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Although he was largely unaware of the Avett Brothers and their music, Masten became a fan and approached their team, who gave the go-ahead, and work began on transforming the album into a musical. By 2018, the producers also enlisted playwright and screenwriter John Logan (Gladiator, Skyfall, film version of Sweeney Todd and Tony-winning play Red). The show tweaked some of the details of the actual incident — the ship was now an American one out of Massachusetts — but it still dwelled on the idea of people being forced to make an unsavory choice about how to survive, complete with a bit of blood onstage (but no actual devouring of flesh).
At Avett’s home in North Carolina, Logan read the script to the musician. Since the songs on the album were more elliptical than specific — they don’t literally spell out the details of the story — Avett was taken aback, especially at the new angle (who survives and who doesn’t) at the end of the show. “When I heard that twist, that was it,” he says. “It was so intense and so right, and so good and said so much about loving someone else and self-sacrifice. Oh, my God, that was it.”
Another producer, Gigi Pritzker, had worked on Red Roses, Green Gold, the 2017 Off-Broadway musical built around the songs of the Grateful Dead, and also on Million Dollar Quartet, the musical about a 1956 jam involving Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis. “Having had that experience, I was like, ‘Okay, you can take music that may not be Broadway song and dance, and it may not be a Broadway structure of songs that progress the story line,’” Pritzker says. “But I thought, ‘This is very doable.’ Swept Away is technically a jukebox musical, but it doesn’t feel like a jukebox musical.” Music arrangers Chris Miller and Brian Usifer adhered to a small unplugged folk band offstage, in what Usifer calls a quest for “a cohesive piece rather than a collection of songs.”
Although some investors were wary (and snobbery toward jukebox musicals still lingered), Swept Away managed to raise $14.5 million from investors. But it faced one hurdle right away: Swept Away was first scheduled to workshop at the Berkeley Repertory Theater in California in 2020, but the pandemic killed those plans. The show eventually opened there later that year, followed by a run in Washington, D.C., in late 2023. Its Broadway debut was penciled in for November 2024. By then, the staging — especially a scene-seating capsizing of the boat, which makes room for the lifeboat — was in place, and the gruesome denouement also remained. “We were told [the show] was different and there were challenges,” says Avett. “But when I think about movies, it seems like that [savagery] would play easily on film. Not easily, but it plays, and people would show up for it. God, they go and watch Terrifier or whatever. They’re willing.”
Avett also felt the musical’s message would overcome any queasiness when potential customers heard the storyline. “I believe everybody relates to this show,” he says. “The dark hope in the show is everybody’s to face in their own way, with partnership, family, and your own salvation. I think it was for everybody, and I was hoping everybody would see it on Broadway.”
After previews, Swept Away opened at the Longacre Theater on Nov. 19. For the first few weeks the venue was filled to 80 precent capacity, with the highest-priced tickets at $248. But to keep the show going, Swept Away would have to make more each week and lure in non-Avett fans, which proved challenging. “We knew it was something that would take time to catch on,” says Masten. “The first week or two was filled with a lot of Avett Brothers fans, but we felt like the theater community itself would be a bit of a harder sell, especially when you’re in a fall season with Sunset Boulevard, Gypsy and these titles that people know.”
In its review, the New York Times called it “among the darkest, most unsparing musicals ever to anchor itself on Broadway” but also noted, “You may nevertheless want to ask yourself whether a show whose sound effects include amplified vomit is right for you.” Catching some of the performances himself, Avett (who, like the other band members, was not in the show itself) kept a watchful eye on the moment when one of the characters sacrifices himself, over his brother, so that the others can live. “Nobody [in the audience] knew how the play was going to deal with, this dilemma,” Avett says. “Especially when you realize somebody’s flesh has to feed this boat, you feel the tension start. I heard people grunt or moan. We heard that a couple of people passed out or fainted or came close to fainting. People left, people gasped and, and I think there were some yells. It was intense.”
The show didn’t experience a big bump during Thanksgiving week, which often happens with Broadway fare, and only half the tickets were sold the week ending Dec. 1. And given the high cost of maintaining a Broadway show, its days were numbered. The fact that it opened right around the time of a deeply polarizing and exhausting presidential election may not have helped either. “It’s complicated material,” says Masten. “It makes you work, it makes you think, it makes you feel. We’re in a complicated time. Maybe sometimes people don’t want to feel that much. We were going to need to run for a while to get word of mouth, to get people to understand what the show is. And unfortunately, we just weren’t seeing the ticket sales increase at the rate we needed them to.”
Finally, on Dec. 5, the show’s closing went public. On the heels of the news, ticket sales surged — not atypical when a show’s finale is announced — and the run was extended two more weeks, finally wrapping up on Dec. 29 after a grand total of 48 performances and an unprofitable gross of $4.5 million. Ironically, its last week was its highest grossing. “To see the outpouring of support and that last week of full houses told me there is still a place for a show like this,” says Masten. “Maybe the timing wasn’t right, or maybe there are things that need to be done differently, but there is interest. That’s made the closure of the show, at least for me, a lot more bearable.”
Those who worked on the show remain in a bit of shell shock. Pritzker admits to “moments crying in my room.” Adds Hudock, “I have incredible joy at having been a part of something like this. We all took a big chance, and if you’re not taking big chances, what are you doing? The thing I just keep reminding myself is that we got a show to Broadway, and not every show, especially a show that’s artistically risky and challenging, makes it to Broadway. And that, for me, is the saving grace of any of those depressive moments that certainly do come.”
When he himself isn’t bummed out, Scott Avett (who flew to New York to be with the cast and crew during its final week) remains philosophical. “The show forces the viewer to deal with the shape of their soul at the end of their life,” he says. “It presents that dilemma, and that’s not exactly what everybody wants to deal with at the matinee in the afternoon! You’re wanting to see Wicked or one of those other fabulous shows. This show is talking about God in a very real, intentional way. And not a lot of Americans are necessarily signing up to do that, except in specific scenarios.”
The Swept Away creators are also heartened by the release of the show’s original cast album next month and the idea that, in one form or another, the show will live on, whether through its songs or a future revival. In a moment of levity, Hudock adds, “But we will not be going on a cruise ship.”
