When Sting returned to the nautical themes and settings of his 1991 album, The Soul Cages, for his stage musical The Last Ship more than two decades later, he pulled a pair of songs from that old album out of dry dock, but wrote more than a dozen new ones for the show. Prolific North Carolina troubadours the Avett Brothers have taken a more labor-saving approach to their new seafaring musical, Swept Away: All of its Americana-flavored songs are previously released, with five taken from their 2004 concept album, Mignonette—inspired by the same 19th-century disaster at sea dramatized in the new stage production—with nine others cherry-picked from various Avetts records up through 2016’s True Sadness. 

That’s just statistics, not criticism. What matters is that the songs fit swimmingly into the narrative that book writer John Logan (who also worked on The Last Ship, not to mention Arena Stage’s Mark Rothko bio-play Red and several huge movies, including Gladiator and Skyfall) has spun. Logan introduces us sometime in the early 20th century to the last survivor of a whaling ship that came to grief off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1888. This man, haunted by the ghosts of his departed shipmates as he lives out his final days in a tuberculosis ward, is called Mate—no one else here gets a proper name, either—and he’s inhabited in a mannered but undeniably powerful performance by John Gallagher Jr., who won a Tony Award for his performance in Spring Awakening back in 2007. 

Reunited here with Spring Awakening director Michael Mayer, Gallgher leads a first-rate company that includes Stark Sands, Adrian Blake Enscoe, and Wayne Duvall in its other key roles—Big Brother, Little Brother, and Captain, respectively. All four prove to be expressive and distinct interpreters of the Avetts’ songs, individually and together. There are eight other strapping but anonymous crewmen aboard the whaling vessel Mignonette to help out with the upbeat numbers (“Hard Worker,” “May It Last”) about the joys and costs of being a sailor in Swept Away’s first half. Their salty esprit de corps can’t survive as melancholy about the waning days of the whaling trade—kerosene is fast replacing whale oil, Duvall’s Captain laments, rendering men like him obsolete—is replaced by despair at the cruelty of the sea. I’ve seen a double-digit number of productions of Twelfth Night and The Tempest, but I’ve never seen a more frightening on-stage shipwreck than what set designer Rachel Hauck, lighting designer Kevin Adams, and sound designer John Shivers have devised for the midshow calamity that winnows the Mignonette’s crew of 14 down to four desperate men in a lifeboat. (The four principals all reprise their roles from Swept Away’s maiden voyage at Berkeley Rep in early 2022.) 

That fragile little dinghy is the crucible where we learn what drove Mate to seek employment aboard the doomed ship. It’s also where the piece’s primary character relationship, between Sands’ stable, protective Big Brother and his adventure-hungry younger sibling played by Enscoe, finds its most stirring expression in songs like “Satan Pulls the Strings.” The Avetts’ main singer-songwriters, Scott and Seth Avett, are actual, biological siblings after all. (The other three band members are related only in name, like the Righteous Brothers or the Traveling Wilburys.)

Swept Away packs a lot of incident, a lot of insight, and 14 very fine songs (with fresh arrangements from Brian Usifer and Chris Miller) into a mere 90 minutes—a feat of narrative efficiency that might actually work against an enterprise with such clear designs on Broadway. But it’s hard to imagine that anyone who takes this voyage won’t feel shaken, stirred, and finally grateful to find themselves on dry land once the curtain falls.

Swept Away, book by John Logan, music and lyrics by the Avett Brothers and arranged by Brian Usifer and Chris Miller, and directed by Michael Mayer, runs through Jan. 14 at Arena Stage. arenastage.org. $109–$149. 

Tickets are selling fast and most productions only have standing room still available.