With Swept Away, John Gallagher Jr. Is Living His Avett Brothers Fanboy Dreams

One mid-August afternoon in the mid-aughts, John Gallagher Jr., at the time a folk-rock musician and up-and-coming New York stage actor, was strolling around the Philadelphia Folk Festival—at the Old Pool Farm in Upper Salford Township, Pennsylvania—when a sound in the distance caught his ear.

“I heard them start playing and I thought, wow, that sounds really unique—I've never heard anything quite like what these guys are doing,” he told Tamsen Fadal on The Broadway Show. “So I walked over to the stage and I watched their whole set.”

It was the first time Gallagher heard the Avett Brothers—a North Carolina group led by Scott and Seth Avett—whose sound was a raw, rootsy and frequently raucous blend of folk, bluegrass and rock’n’roll. Gallagher picked up their CD that day—and the one t-shirt they had on offer—and has been a devoted Avett Brothers fan ever since. When he starred in American Idiot on Broadway in 2010, an Avett Brothers poster adorned the wall of his dressing room; he turned his co-star Stark Sands onto the group. “I was sort of a wannabe publicist for them. I was always telling people to check out the band.”

Two decades later, Gallagher begins performances in Swept Away, the new show centered around the songs of the Avett Brothers, this month. The musical—reuniting Gallagher not only with Sands but with American Idiot director Michael Mayer—had its world premiere at Berkeley Rep and opened at Arena Stage in D.C. last year.

Gallagher leapt aboard the Swept Away project seven years ago—that's how long it's taken to grow the beard, he joked. Along with the prospect of working with Mayer and book writer John Logan, the work of the Avetts was the obvious enticement; it's music that lives at the intersection of two musical genres that have been near and dear to Gallagher since childhood. “My dad is obsessed with folk music—traditional Irish Celtic folk music—and my mom showed me Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and West Side Story and Camelot when I was a kid. She was the show tune lover and also a folk music lover." It's why he loves the musical world of Swept Away so much. "It mixes the folk music that I grew up with with theater, which is another world that I love to operate in.”

In 2004, the Avett Brothers themselves dove headfirst into the murky waters of musical theater storytelling. Mignonette was a sweeping, ambitious concept album riffing on the harrowing tale of an 1884 shipwreck. That story served as a jumping off point for Logan. The result is a musical that that grapples—with callus-inducing fervor—with ideas of brotherhood, family, morality and mortality.

Even when their songs aren't narrative-based, Gallagher said, there's an honesty and adventurousness to the Avetts’ lyrics that lends itself to theater (and has inspired his own songwriting). “They're truth tellers,” he said. “Their music is unbelievably raw and honest and to the point and vulnerable—it really kind of runs the spectrum. Every single kind of moment in the human experience is in one of their songs, it seems.”

As for the show itself: “It sounds a bit hacky to call a show a ride, so I’m loath to use the terminology—but I have to because I don’t know how else to describe it. It really is a ride. It grabs you. It’s energetic. It comes out of the gate swinging. You know from the first five minutes that it’s going to be a unique night at the theater.” It's also "probably the most emotional piece of theater I've worked on."

Earlier in the year, Gallagher and his Swept Away castmates took to the Forest Hills Stadium stage with the Avett Brothers to announce that the show was officially Broadway-bound, as well as perform the title number together. It was just the latest pinch-me moment for the unabashed Avett Brothers fanboy. “I barely remember it," said Gallagher. "It was just emotionally overwhelming to walk out onto the stage with them.”