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‘Swept Away’ Review: Avett Brothers Musical Fails to Satisfy Despite a Sterling Broadway Staging
There’s so much to recommend this sterling Broadway staging that it seems unkind, or even unfair, to call the musical a misfire.
There’s so much to recommend “ Swept Away ” — about two brothers from a religious family who get trapped on an ill-fated whaling ship with a crew of doomed heathens — that it seems unkind, or even unfair, to call it a misfire. And David Neumann’s choreography — which is not at all made up of kitschy Broadway numbers but instead rollicking reels performed by the all-male cast on the ship’s deck — is so joyous that it dares audience members not to jump to their feet and clog. In contrast, the first mate (Gallagher Jr.) has neither family nor faith, and though this doesn’t make him evil, it allows him to come up with the one idea that might both save him and ruin him forever: He wants to kill the weakest of the men in the dinghy, Little Brother, so that the rest can then eat his flesh and live.
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