Review Roundup: SWEPT AWAY at Berkeley Rep

The Avett Brothers musical Swept Away, written by Tony Award-winning stage and screen writer John Logan and helmed by Tony Award-winning director Michael Mayer, just opened at Berkeley Rep. The engagement was recently extended for a second time and will now play through Sunday, March 6, 2022.

The cast of Swept Away is led by Tony Award winner John Gallagher, Jr. (Spring Awakening), Tony Award nominee Stark Sands (Kinky Boots), Wayne Duvall (O Brother, Where Art Thou?) and Adrian Blake Enscoe (Apple TV+ Dickinson). The ensemble will feature Taurean Everett, Cameron Johnson, Brandon Kalm, Coleton Schmitto, Ben Toomer, Vishal Vaidya, Ryan Watkinson, and Jacob Keith Watson.

Swept Away is set in 1888, off the coast of New Bedford, MA. When a violent storm sinks their whaling ship, the four surviving souls - a young man in search of adventure, his older brother who has sworn to protect him, a captain at the end of a long career at sea, and a worldly first mate who has fallen from grace - each face a reckoning: How far will I go to stay alive? And can I live with the consequences?

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Lily Janiak, SF Chronicle: In its current incarnation, the show, even at a lean 90 minutes, takes an awfully long time to paddle out of the backstory's whirlpool into the present tense. It establishes, re-establishes and re-re-establishes how Big Brother (Stark Sands) and Little Brother (Adrian Blake Enscoe) just fell off the turnip truck; how they're not "natural mariners"; how they honor their parents, the farm, their god; how much Little Brother misses his girl. The exposition of the Captain (Wayne Duvall) is so flowery - "What are we but useless men hunting vanishing prey in a dying trade?" - as to become a red herring. Is "Swept Away" about to sail into "Moby-Dick" territory?

Steve Murray, BroadwayWorld: Dead man tell no tales, so three apparitions appear to their surviving shipwreck mate beseeching him to tell their stories in John Logan's brilliant World Premiere musical based on the stirring music of award winning Avett Brothers. That story, involving a tragic shipwreck, is a mesmerizing tale of unbearable life-changing choices, cathartic soul searching and bro bonding. The superb cast, crisp direction and passionate score are breathtaking and emotionally mesmerizing.

Lily Janiak, San Francisco Chronicle: But once the vessel hits choppy waters, the show rights itself. Rachel Hauck's whopper of a set design makes three-dimensional "Tetris" of a tuberculosis ward, a whaler deck, a tempest and open water, with a reveal grander and more magical than anything millions of dollars in CGI could create. Kevin Adams' canny lighting design can create the illusion of a waterline on the ship's hull or help turn the dying into ghosts. The cast is ace too. Gallagher composes a whole melodic line within one-syllable spoken words, activating his whole body to his task in a way that makes him seem more alive than the rest of us.

Jay Barmann, SFist: Ultimately, the dramatization of this sorry tale might have been more successful if we were given much to care about in these characters. Take away the songs, and we're left with a pair of two-dimensional rubes - Big Brother and Little Brother, one pious and staid, the other seeking adventure who left a girl back home - and the devilish hedonist played by Gallagher, a sailor adrift with no family ties whose only pleasures are drink and sex with prostitutes in port. The Captain carves out a mean and tragic figure of his own, but all told these are hollow shells asking us to invest in their tragic fates.

Sally Hogarty, East Bay Times: The show features the incredible talents of Tony Award-winning stage and screen writer John Logan with the multiple Grammy Award-nominated Avett Brothers writing the music and lyrics. It seems appropriate that the music would be by two brothers, given that the same familial relationship is at the story's heart.

Photo Credit: Kevin Berne/Berkeley Repertory Theatre

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