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    The Avett Brothers Braved Choppy Waters to Bring ‘Swept Away’ to Broadway

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    The Avett Brothers were all ears a decade ago when a determined crew of theater upstarts and veterans came aboard to adapt their maritime album for “Swept Away.”In the early days of the 21st century, before the Top 5 albums and the three Grammy nominations, the Avett Brothers were a band of three young guys, relentlessly touring their blend of folk-rock-country, sprinting from show to show in their van. Between gigs, Scott Avett’s father gave him a copy of “The Custom of the Sea,” Neil Hanson’s book chronicling the 19th-century wreck of the Mignonette, a British yacht, and its tragic aftermath.On the road, Scott would recap the pages he had read, to his brother Seth and their bandmate Bob Crawford. They eventually decided that the harrowing survival story of these crewmen, stranded off the Cape of Good Hope on the South African coast, would be the foundation for their second studio album. It was released in 2004, and they titled it “Mignonette.”Over the next few years, the Avett Brothers were selling out arenas, their style of Americana, including emotionally probing lyrics, establishing them as stars in the genre. And then, one day about a decade after “Mignonette” came out, they received a curious call: A young theater producer named Matthew Masten asked if they would be interested in having the album adapted for a stage musical.“It sounded like a good idea,” said Scott Avett, who sings and plays guitar and banjo in the group. “But ideas are a dime a dozen, and a very small percentage of them seem to happen.”It took another decade, numerous stops and starts, and several regional productions of this unlikely story, but the new musical “Swept Away” has finally reached Broadway. It opens on Nov. 19 at the Longacre Theater.The crewmen of “Swept Away”: Adrian Blake Enscoe as the thrill-seeking Little Brother, Stark Sands as the pious Big Brother, John Gallagher Jr. as the Mate, and Wayne Duvall as the stoic Captain. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Nick Mavar, ‘Deadliest Catch’ Star, Dies at 59

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      Mr. Mavar, who ran a fishing operation in Alaska, starred in the reality television show for 16 years and captained his own boat.Nick Mavar, a commercial salmon fisherman known for his tenacity and resourcefulness who was also a deckhand on the Discovery Channel’s extreme fishing reality show “Deadliest Catch,” died on Thursday at a hospital in King Salmon, Alaska. He was 59.His death was confirmed by his wife, Julie (Hanson) Mavar. His nephew Jake Anderson said that Mr. Mavar had a heart attack on Thursday while on a ladder at a boatyard in Naknek, Alaska, where he ran his fishing operation, and fell onto a dry dock.He was pronounced dead at a hospital, Mr. Anderson said.The Bristol Bay Borough Police Department in Naknek confirmed that Mr. Mavar had died but declined on Friday evening to share additional details.“Deadliest Catch,” which follows crab fishermen on their strenuous and sometimes brutal job off the Alaskan coast, is one of the top-rated programs on basic cable, drawing millions of viewers.The show premiered in 2005, and Mr. Mavar appeared in 98 episodes, working on a fishing boat called the F/V Northwestern until 2021.Mr. Mavar left the show while filming an expedition in 2020 after his appendix ruptured, revealing a cancerous tumor, Mr. Anderson said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ Was An Unlikely Hit

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      Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 folk ballad told the true story of a shipwreck on Lake Superior. One of his old friends called it “a documentarian’s song.”Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian folk singer who died on Monday at 84, had one hit in particular that famously defied Top 40 logic.“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” his 1976 folk ballad, was unusual partly because, at more than six minutes long, it was about twice as long as most pop hits. It also retold a real-life tragedy — the 1975 sinking on Lake Superior of a freighter with 29 crewmen aboard — with meticulous attention to detail.“It’s a documentarian’s song, when you think about it,” said Eric Greenberg, a longtime friend of the singer who interviewed Mr. Lightfoot as a student journalist in the late 1970s and later co-wrote a song with him.The plotline of a typical Top 40 hit usually consists of “boy meets girl, boy breaks up with girl, or come back, or you left me, or whatever,” Mr. Greenberg said, speaking by phone from New York City. “Not a five-, six-, seven-minute story — a factual story, in Gordon’s case, painstakingly checked to make sure that all the facts are right.”Here’s the true story that inspired “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” and a look at the song that kept its memory alive.A disappearing shipThe Edmund Fitzgerald was a 729-foot ore carrier and one of the largest freighters on the Great Lakes when it left Superior, Wis., on Nov. 9, 1975, carrying iron pellets bound for Detroit.The next day, the ship was caught in a storm with winds that averaged 60 to 65 miles an hour. Its captain reported 20- to 25-foot waves washing over the decks and water pouring in below deck through two broken air vents.That night, the Edmund Fitzgerald sank near the coasts of Ontario and Michigan, in water that was only about 50 degrees. A nearby ship reported seeing its lights disappear in the driving snow.The Coast Guard later found lifeboats, life rings and other debris from the ship. But the lifeboats were self-inflatable, so their discovery did not necessarily indicate that they had been used. None of the 29 crew members survived.An unlikely successThe morning after the Fitzgerald went down, the rector of Mariners’ Church of Detroit tolled its bell 29 times, once for each man lost. An Associated Press reporter knocked on the church’s door, interviewed the rector and filed an account that was published in newspapers.Mr. Lightfoot read the article. Soon afterward, he started singing a song about the wreck during a previously scheduled recording session. His band joined in, and the first version of the song that they recorded was later released, according to “Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind,” a 2020 documentary.There was no expectation that the song would become a hit single, because its length made it too long for airplay on the radio. But it would spend 21 weeks on the Billboard charts and peak at No. 2, one notch behind Mr. Lightfoot’s only No. 1 hit, “Sundown.” It also turned the tale of the sinking into a modern legend.Yet unlike songs that use a real-life story as the basis for embellishment, Mr. Lightfoot’s ballad hewed precisely to the real-life details. The weight of the ore, for example — “26,000 tons more than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty” — was accurate. So was the number of times that the church bell chimed in Detroit.Decades later, Mr. Lightfoot changed the lyrics slightly after investigations into the accident revealed that waves, not crew error, had led to the shipwreck. In the new lyrics, he sang that it got dark at 7 that November night on Lake Superior — not that a main hatchway caved in.“That’s the kind of meticulous, looking-for-the-truth kind of guy that he was,” Mr. Greenberg said.An enduring legacy“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” like its creator, endured as a Canadian classic long after slipping off the Top 40 charts. The bluegrass guitarist Tony Rice (who also released an entire album of Lightfoot cover songs) and the rock bands Rheostatics and the Dandy Warhols were among those who sang covers over the years.“The melodies are so powerful and he’s such a good storyteller and such a beautiful lyricist,” the Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan said in the 2020 documentary. “And the combination of those things just really makes for a great song.”Mr. Lightfoot remained proud of it for decades, and he kept newspaper clippings and items given to him by the crew members’ surviving families in his home, Mr. Greenberg said.The song’s success had one downside: It turned the wreck, which lies in Canadian territory at a depth of about 500 feet, into a trophy for divers, upsetting the lost sailors’ families. In 2006, the government of Ontario adopted a law protecting the site. More

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      in Music

      Indonesia Submarine Crew Sang a Farewell Song, Weeks Before Sinking

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      A video of the sailors singing went viral on social media, prompting many to infer a hidden meaning in the pop song’s lyrics.Below deck on their submarine, Indonesian sailors crowded around a crewman with a guitar and crooned a pop song called “Till We Meet Again.”Weeks later, the same sailors vanished deep beneath the Pacific Ocean while descending for a torpedo drill, setting off a frantic international search. Indonesian military officials said on Sunday, four days after the vessel disappeared, that it had broken into three pieces hundreds of meters below the surface, leaving no survivors among the 53 crew members.Now, the video of the submariners singing is resonating across Indonesian social media, in a nation where many people are jaded by a steady stream of bad news: devastating earthquakes, erupting volcanoes and sinking ferries.“If land is not where you are destined to return to, there is a place for you in heaven,” members of the band Endank Soekamti, who composed the song, wrote on Instagram below a clip of the sailors’ performance.The clip went viral after the Indonesian Navy released it on Monday. Lt. Col. Djawara Whimbo, a spokesman for the Indonesian military, said in an interview on Tuesday that the video had been recorded last month to honor the outgoing commander of the navy’s submarine fleet.The video has hit a nerve online, in part because the song — which describes a reluctant goodbye — sounds especially poignant in the wake of the accident.Some social media users speculated that the sailors had a “hunch” about the looming accident and were singing about their own fate. Colonel Whimbo said that was a reflection of “cocoklogi,” an Indonesian phrase that describes looking back at people’s lives to find clues to explain seemingly random events.People in the Muslim-majority country, from remote villagers to senior politicians, often rely on faith and superstition to understand current events. A succession of Indonesian presidents have paid their respects to the spirit world, consulting with seers or collecting what they believed were magic tokens, for example.In the years after the 2004 tsunami that killed 230,000 people in Indonesia and elsewhere, many Indonesians blamed the disaster on then-President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, saying that he carried the shadow of cosmic misfortune.Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a former spokesman for Indonesia’s disaster management agency, told The New York Times in 2018 that he made a point of incorporating local wisdom and traditional beliefs while communicating the science of disasters.“The cultural approach works better than just science and technology,” Mr. Sutopo said. “If people think that it is punishment from God, it makes it easier for them to recover.”The latest diaster struck last week, when a 44-year-old submarine, the Nanggala, disappeared before dawn during training exercises north of the Indonesian island of Bali. Search crews from the United States, India, Malaysia, Australia and Singapore later helped the Indonesian Navy hunt for the vessel in the Bali Sea.For a few days, naval experts worried that the sub might run out of oxygen. Then the navy confirmed over the weekend that it had fractured and sank to a deep seabed.Among the items a remote-controlled submersible found at the crash site was a tattered orange escape suit.A tattered orange escape suit that was found in the waters near where the submarine sank. Fikri Yusuf/Antara Foto, via ReutersPresident Joko Widodo of Indonesia expressed his condolences to the families of the fallen sailors on Monday, calling them “the nation’s best sons” and noting that the government would pay for their children’s education through college.“May the spirits of the golden shark warriors get the best place at the side of Almighty God,” he said.The song the sailors sang last month, “Till We Meet Again,” happens to have a complex back story.The musician Erix Soekamti said that he and his bandmates wrote it about six years ago on a remote island east of Bali, as a tribute to the local people they had met over the course of a monthlong recording session.The song’s lyrics can be interpreted as fatalistic:Beginning will endRise will setUps will meet downsThe song was meant to convey optimism, Mr. Soekamti said, but it has slowly become associated with loss, misfortune and death.A few years ago, he said, the crowd at an Indonesian soccer game sang it after a goalie for one of the teams died during a previous match. “Then it became a loser song,” he said. “Now, when a team loses, that song will be sung.”“Till We Meet Again” has been covered by other musicians; a melancholic version by the Indonesian singer Tami Aulia has more than nine million page views on YouTube.But Mr. Soekamti said his band now avoids playing it and recently declined to include it on an upcoming live album.“I am sad,” he said, “and, in a way, afraid.” More