‘Swept Away’ Review: Lost at Sea, How Far Would You Sink?

If you know the tale of the yacht Mignonette, or the Avett Brothers album of the same name, you’ll guess from the first moments of “Swept Away,” a Broadway musical based on both, where the horrific story is headed. But you may not guess how spectacularly it gets there.

The Mignonette was wrecked at sea on July 5, 1884, en route to Sydney from Southampton, England. Its captain, two crewmen and cabin boy survived on a lifeboat for about 20 days until, facing death from starvation, some of them made one of them their unfortunate salvation.

Though drawing most of its songs and themes from that 2004 album, the musical, which opened Tuesday at the Longacre Theater, leaves the specifics of the Mignonette behind. Instead of a small pleasure boat, its vessel is a 300-ton triple-masted whaler. It is American, not English, sailing from New Bedford, Mass. Its captain commands a much larger crew: in Michael Mayer’s literally overwhelming production, 15 Broadway-hardy men.

Among them, the Mate (John Gallagher Jr.) has the most experience of filthy life below decks and depravity on solid ground. At the opposite end of the scale of innocence, a teenager called Little Brother (Adrian Blake Enscoe) has run away from his family’s farm for excitement and adventure. Hot on his tail, Big Brother (Stark Sands) arrives in New Bedford to drag him home, away from impiety, but gets stuck aboard as the ship heaves off.

If it were not already plain from a ghostly prologue that they are all doomed, the Captain (Wayne Duvall) sees portents almost immediately in the sea’s phosphorescence. This is, he says, his last voyage, as both he, the ship and the whaling industry are failing. You can take that theologically too: How will we face our own last voyages? That the characters are identified by titles rather than names suggests the show’s morality-tale ambitions.