Mickey Jo (0:00)

Does anyone remember one of the final lines from the stage play adaptation of Life of PI where PI says to the two other characters on stage with him, which version of the story do you prefer? The one with animals or the one without? That was my prevailing thought as I left the theater after seeing Swept Away. Oh my God. Hey. Welcome back to my theater themed YouTube channel. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theater. I'm also a professional theater critic here on social media as well as a theatrical pundit. I am based in the uk, but several times year increasingly I head over to New York to see as many Broadway and Off Broadway shows as possible. And on my most recent trip I saw a bunch of new musicals, all of which were opening around the same time. There were like four or five brand new musicals opening on Broadway within this two week period, including Swept Away at the Longacre Theatre. Now, I saw this show during an earlier preview performance, which is why I didn't fully review it here on my channel because I didn't see a press performance. It opened shortly after I left. And not long after that came the sad recent news that the show will be concluding its run at the Longacre Theatre early. Now, the reason that Swept Away is going so soon is, you know, partially it's because of the grosses and because it's not making money and to keep it open for any longer than they need to if it's going to keep losing money. That's not ideal for producers and investors. The reason it's going this side of the holidays, which might seem a little bit strange because the holidays are often an affluent and successful time for Broadway and for tourists coming in to see shows might be partially due to the nature of the show and it not attracting, you know, the lion's share of that kind of festive tourism, but also because of a like a tax break exemption. I'm not an expert on finances, I'm an expert on theater, where they will save money by closing this side of the new year. And before I even get into this video, I want to acknowledge the potentially controversial title which I have given it. I haven't decided exactly which adjective I'm using yet, but some somewhere beneath my face here on YouTube is probably written something slightly incendiary. And I've done this for a very deliberate reason because I like with these videos to try and respond to the questions that I think people are going to be asking with this musical. Is it any good? This show? Why is it closing? Is it closing because it's bad? Is it closing because it's boring? And there's a more nuanced conversation around this. But by and large, I want to debunk the idea that shows close in the West End or on Broadway simply because they are bad. There are a whole host of other reasons going into it. And and in so many of these videos, which sadly, I've been making a lot of recently, with a lot of early closures from multiple shows, I will lay out a whole bunch of extensive reasons why a show has made the decision to conclude its run possibly early, and I will inevitably get a handful of comments saying it's just because it's bad. It's a bad show. Like, no one wants to go see Broadway shows. It's too expensive. That's a factor. But there are more details within that because there are still shows that continue to succeed. There are shows which do very well. So the question is always why them and not this. So to answer this question, we're going to look at a couple of different factors. We're going to look at the critical response to the show because this is a very interesting example. We can compare and contrast this with Tammy Faye, which did not do very well critically, and Swept Away, which did do very well critically, which got a New York Times critics pick an accolade more usually associated with Tony Award wins and a healthy run. We're also going to talk about the other components of finding financial success at the box office. We're going to be talking about casting. We're going to be talking about the creatives and kind of any kind of draw that would bring people to this show and what the demographic for this might have been. But finally, one of the most interesting things about this particular show and this particular closing that I would like to take a look at is the idea of word of mouth. I have one more disclaimer to issue before we get into any of this, which is to extend extraordinary sympathies to the cast, to the company, to the creatives, to everyone working backstage beyond the theater front of house, everyone whose employment going to be affected by the disappointing early closure of Swept Away, especially right before the holidays. That's got to be challenging. I would love for there to be enough enthusiasm for Broadway. I would love for there to be enough demand that can sustain healthy runs of a load of different shows, shows that are taking creative risks, shows that know that they are for smaller subsections of audiences that aren't these obvious commercial like bring the whole family, Tourists can come. You don't need a great grasp on English. Everyone's going to understand this regardless of whether or not you know what we're saying. Like that's not what we want to be moving towards with the theater industry. I would love for there to be enough audiences to sustain everything. Sadly, we know that's not the case now. If you do enjoy this video, make sure to subscribe to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Turn on the notifications somewhere below my face so that you can stay up to date with all the goings on on Broadway and in the West End. Hopefully this is the last shock closure announcement. We are definitely in the time of year for it. Hopefully once we get past January we don't have any more of this drama for a little while and I can go back to sharing good news about Tony nominations and the Olivier Awards and other fun things. But in the meantime, here are my thoughts on why Swept Away may be closing on Broadway. And it's not because it's bad. So for those of you who don't know and are potentially just curious about the industry or hadn't heard of Swept Away, that may be part of the problem. In fact, Swept Away is a new musical which had its world premiere production a few years ago at Berkeley Rep. Subsequently there was a production at Arena Stage in dc. It came to Broadway at the end of this year, 2024, and it is technically a jukebox musical, but not in the sense that we increasingly see it's a jukebox musical in the same way that Girl from the north country is, because it's not a plot, it's not a narrative based around the biography of the artist's life. It uses music from, correct me if I'm wrong, the Avett Brothers. I'd been saying the Avett bro, because that's how it looks like it's pronounced. But I heard someone say avet in the street with conviction in New York, and so I believe them now. And I drew a comparison to Girl from the north country because I think it tonally lives in a sort of a similar realm. But to give it its credit, you could also call this a Duke Borg's musical in the same sense that American Idiot is, or the who's Tommy? Because technically the story that unfolds in this book written by John Logan for the stage, the book of the musical that is. It's based on the same historic event that inspired the writing of the album that it draws music from. So everything is sort of linked. In other words, these musicians were thinking about this historic event when they wrote the music that would then subsequently be used for a musical inspired by this historic event, not adapting it directly. There are differences. Now, I will have to entirely spoil the plot for you to articulate the point that I need to in this video, because it's a really big factor of it. And what this is based on is this famous shipwreck. Famous because the survivors. I believe there were three survivors of the shipwreck, and two of them cannibalized the young cabin boy who had already become unwell due to drinking seawater while they were stranded, basically. And they thought no one was coming for them. They thought they had no other choice. This became a landmark criminal trial where it was ruled that this was not a justification, this was not a defense for the murder and cannibalism that they committed. Cheery stuff. This is noteworthy, however, because the real name of the young cabin boy in this real circumstance was Richard Parker, who also inspired the Name of the Tiger, featured in the famous book Life of PI, adapted for film, adapted for the stage recently seen on Broadway not too long ago. And the events in Life of PI differ from this historic shipwreck in the same way that Swept Away differs from this historic shipwreck. But Swept Away is closer because we have multiple men together in a boat who have survived this shipwreck for, I'd say, the first third of the musical. It's about them going onto the ship. We meet the crew who have been working on it previously and who are used to this life. And we meet a young man who has determined to go away to sea, and his older brother who has followed him to try and stop him, to take him back to their farm. He is a man of the Lord, and he doesn't necessarily want anything to do with this particular life. Eventually, after a fairly drawn out, atmospheric introduction to this concept, there is a storm, there is a shipwreck. There is this vast, extraordinary transformation of the set, this set designed by Rachel Hawke. And it turns from being the deck of a ship to this upturned ship and a small boat rotating around on the playing space. Basically, it's very, very, very cool how they show this boat sort of lazily turning in the middle of the ocean and how they convey that on. I think the way that the boat turns is actually even cooler than, like, the shipwreck, because we've seen shipwrecks before on stage, but the way that they capture that motion and the way that they use mirrors and that set is gorgeous. Lovely. Wonderful. I should add, as well, the whole thing is framed with one of the survivors of this because, spoiler alert, they don't all die at sea, even though they're there for weeks with no food. One of the survivors is readying for death, and the ghosts of the other three sort of haunt him in this moment and encourage him to tell their story, tell his story and confront the realities of what happened and what they all did, which we find out about eventually. And I'll tell you a little bit more about the plot as we get into a subsequent section, but I want to share with you more of the details of this show's closing announcement from its press release here. So it opened on Tuesday, November 19th. It began preview performances a little ahead of that. It's closing on the 15th. As we said, it will have played 32 regular performances and 20 previews at the time of its closing. This is notable because I think this is just slightly fewer than Tammy Faye. It's more than K Pop managed. It's slightly less than Diana the Musical. But I believe those four are four of the shortest runs, or possibly the four shortest runs since Broadway reopened post pandemic. And they're not the shortest runs in Broadway history. We've had shows close on opening night. We've had shows close before opening night. But in terms of where we are now, where the industry is now, and the extents that, you know, shows go to, to develop, to play regionally, to be workshopped, and to have a huge amount of money invested in them, there's kind of the hope that everything will find at least the smallest amount of success. And for something to have a run this brief on Broadway, it is, you know, not to disparage the creatives, the cast, any of the work done on this production, the producers, the marketing, not to individually blame anyone. Something has gone wrong for it to run that short a period. Now the producers of Swept Away have shared a statement. They said, we are deeply proud of this beautiful production and the years of work that it took to get to Broadway. As mentioned, we will forever be indebted to our fantastic creative team, our loyal actors and all of our co producers and in turn their investors for believing in this production and taking a risk on new work. They said, sorry, investors. Sorry about that. And I should add, it hasn't closed yet. Tickets for remaining performances are available for purchase@sweptawaymusical.com as well as Telecharge. If you have any interest in seeing this show before it closes on Broadway on December 15th, please do so. It'd be wonderful if they would have responsive, engaged audiences for the remainder of their run, they will be releasing an original Broadway cast recording. This was recently announced. It's set for digital release on Friday, February 7, and a physical CD released in early 2025. Now, there's another note here about the show's regional life, because often with these things, you know, people question why they brought it to Broadway in the first place. A lot of these decisions get retroactively called misguided. And hindsight is 20 20. It's very easy for us to sit here. It's very easy for me to sit here after the fact of a closing announcement and look back and say, clearly that was a bad idea. Clearly these mistakes were made. It's not that easy to see that ahead of time. And here you're going to find out why. So prior to Broadway, Swept Away sold out runs at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and was thrice ext and at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. in the winter of 2023, where it became the highest grossing show in its history. That is no small feat. In total, Swept Away has captivated audiences from all 50 states. I wonder how they measure that. Wonder how they wonder how they found out that plus the District of Columbia as well as throughout the globe. So those are the details about the closing. Let's discuss what this show had going for it and what the plan would have been in terms of its marketing, in terms of the demographic and who they were going to try and convince to come and see this show. Because the big thing they were leav leading with since it was announced and throughout its early days on Broadway was the Avett Brothers of it all. They were selling not only merchandise for the show in the lobby and downstairs, they were also selling merchandise that said Avet sailor. That was a hashtag that the show was really leaning into. I don't know who the Avett Brothers are, but that's not a surprise because I don't know much about popular music really of any genre. Like, I'm aware of bits of it, but I'm a musical theater fan who pays attention to musical theater. I don't know things about other things outside of that. All you need to do to sell me on a musical is to say there's this new Broadway musical and John Gallagher Jr's in it and Michael Mayer's directed. And there's a the set design is very excited, Stark said. I'm already there. I was there from John Gallagher Jr. I'm like, say less. I'm there. Fine, done. It takes very little to get me into a theater because I'M a theater person and the people they'd have been trying to reach with the Avett Brothers angle is the Avett Brothers fans, presumably for them to have gone all in on this approach. That is a band that has a significant fan base who, I mean, on the basis that they enjoy that kind of a music, presumably they would also enjoy a show inspired by similar concepts that features all of that music. And it has that very classic, American, slightly rustic feel. But what I will say here, and as mentioned, I don't know this band or their fan base and I could be completely misreading this. From the nature of their music in the show, it feels like. I don't know, it feels like we're aiming towards, like a blue collar kind of a market here who aren't necessarily readily going to be able to come and see a Broadway show. Like, it might be a smart enough decision tonally to try and find that audience, to direct stuff towards that audience, but if the show is no cheaper than the rest of what is on Broadway, then it's not particularly accessible to that audience. And the other side of this is that it's hard selling a writer or a creative because for the most part, fans of that musician, fans of that band, if they still perform, they want to go and see them. They would presumably rather go and see an Avett Brothers concert than see. And I mean, if they're huge, committed fans, I dare say a lot of people, because they really love this music and because they love this band, would have gone to see Swept Away. But I dare say there's a lot of people, like, there are Elton John fans who wouldn't necessarily race to go see Tammy Faye because they'd rather go and see Elton John. And at least if it's a Bayer jukebox musical like Beautiful, the Carole King musical, or A Beautiful Noise, the Neil diamond musical, you get to go and celebrate their artistry with the story of their life, with someone, you know, portraying them and performing in their likeness and trying to conjure that memory. And then you get to, like, relive the early stages of their career and all of their best hits. And these other ones don't necessarily do that. That being said, I know people personally who went to go see Girl from the north country because they're huge Bob Dylan fans. So that's not universal. We've talked before in many of these videos about the kind of factors that can guarantee Broadway success, and I find this increasingly really troubling because I don't want an acknowledgement of these shows. Not doing well. To suggest to producers that the only way to guarantee commercial viability and success is to have, you know, star casting is to have stunt casting and celebrities and a really commercial title like a film, Colon, the musical starring this person from TV or this person from film. We see examples of, like that we've seen some opening very recently, actually. I would love to believe that there's still a place for original musicals, even if it doesn't necessarily have original music, but something with a little more creativity and artistry in its conception. And, you know, these weren't nobodies who were starring in this cast. This cast was led by John Gallagher Jr. Who is a Tony Award winner. He starred in the original Broadway production of Spring Awakening, also directed by Michael Mayer, who directed Swept Away. You have Adrian Blake Ensco. I'm reading from his bio right now because this was not an actor who was known to me beforehand, but he is known from an Apple TV series. And you have Stark Sands, who we've seen on Broadway in Kinky Boots in American Idiot, also Michael Mayer in several other things. In fact, this is a reunion, I guess, between Stark Sands and John Gallagher Jr. I hadn't thought about that until now. And John Gallagher Jr. I will say now, in case I forget to say this at some point throughout, this review gives a fantastic performance in this show. If I was telling people to go and see this, I'd say, first of all, are you interested in fantastic set design? Because there's a lot to take from this and learn from this, I guess. But also, John Gallagher Jr's performance is chilling and invigorating. Wonderful turn from him. But it's the kind of performances and like the fact that he is back on Broadway in a Michael Mayer show, the fact that it's reuniting him with Stark as well. These are things that excite musical theater fans. And they don't necessarily reach beyond that Broadway bubble. And for shows to find, you know, long enduring success, they need to be able to reach beyond that Broadway bubble. But that shouldn't stop something from running for more than a month. There are bigger problems here. Here's a weird one. Does Swept Away have an SEO problem? This is in terms of what you get when you search for the show on Google, because if you Google Swept Away, you don't get the musical. You get a film that had Madonna in it. I invite you to try this now. 2002 comedy romance. A haughty, rich housewife and her shipmate gets stranded in a thunderstorm. Not dissimilar but different from the Swept Away that's on Broadway. I also don't want to suggest the people working on this show, social media and marketing, haven't been doing a fantastic job trying to get this out there. The artwork designed for this show, stunning, gorgeous, and really unique. Really standing apart from a lot of the other color palettes and aesthetics of Broadway artwork. I thought that was great. The people who designed the merch, fantastic work on the merchandise, really stunning. And they just recently put together this brilliant social media video with like infrared cameras capturing audience members reactions to one particular dramatic plot twist in the show. That's a great piece of marketing. It doesn't give anything away, but it invites, you know, audiences who would enjoy that kind of a concept. Like, do you like, like an M. Night Shyamalan? Like, are you intrigued by that kind of a story? That's not something we see a huge amount of on Broadway. Would you like to come and see this show again? Is the problem that they were trying to reach people who don't normally come to see especially Broadway musicals. And it is funny because often what I say is, if the show is itself not a name, like how Back to the Future is a name, or the Outsiders and the cast are not names, and I'm sorry to say, you can be a Tony nominee, you can be a Tony Award winner, you can be a celebrated Broadway performer. It doesn't necessarily mean that you are are a name. If it's not a name and they're not names, then you need fantastic critical response. And I would like to live in a world where that is enough, where something can get great reviews and that is enough to infuse it with life at the box office. But Swept Away got quite good reviews. It wasn't universally praised, but it did get a New York Times critics pick. Let's take a look at some of the critical responses and then I'll share a little bit of my own thoughts as well. So let's read a little from that positive review from Jesse Green in. In the New York Times. Jesse Green, a critic who I can't say that I often feel in sync with in terms of my artistic responses to pieces of work on Broadway. This got a critics pick. Other recent recipients of that have included maybe Happy Ending last season. I know, Water for Elephants did the Outsiders. I think. I think the Outsiders must have got a critics pick. Hell's Kitchen got a critics pick. He begins. 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 have swept away a Broadway musical based on both where the horrific story is headed. But you may not guess how spectacularly it gets there 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 suggest the show's morality tale ambitions. Those ambitions are a bit grand, and the book by John Logan seems to struggle as well with the size of the material. Fleshing out the intimate album, he has padded the plot with dialogue that too often feels synthetic. The themes are overdrawn, the four main characters too neatly representing four poles of humanity. But there's no denying that once it gets going, the structure, unlike the ships, is sturdy too soon. The first half of the 95 minute show swiftly introduces the setting, ignites the conflicts, and most important, provides plausible occasions for marvellous songs from the Mignonette album. The Avett Brothers trio, of whom only two are actually brothers, fun fact for you all and for me, right in a rootsy Americana style that suits the milieu well. Their shanties, stomps and lullabies are rousing and soothing and subtly placed, never seeming shoehorned, as in most jukebox musicals. When the ship hits the fated storm, the temperature and tempo shift drastically, if only for a few minutes, in a collaborative coup de lighting by Kevin Adams, sound by John Shivers and even wind in the audience. I have no idea who did that, he writes. Rachel Hawke's astonishing shape, formerly so solid and stately, heaves upwards almost to the vertical and sinks. You may feel as if you are on it. It's all very Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland. That's my words, not his. Logan provides a fine twist in terms of where all this is going, but it's nevertheless worth asking whether a desperate tale like this, with its extreme resolution, is really as relevant to regular life as the musical clearly intends. Does it have something to say about the predatory organisation of society, like Sweeney Todd, with which it shares certain ingredients? Does it speak to human hubris like Titanic, with which it others. I was not convinced, and yet I was fully entertained and harrowed. He then celebrates the creative team, celebrates the cast and finishes by saying, for all its hornpipes and full throated song, its visual panache and masculine eye candy, Swept Away is among the darkest, most unsparing musicals ever to anchor itself on Broadway. I don't disagree, and despite the suggestion of Rapture and its title, it is really about the gravest decisions humans can make, the depths of souls that are darker than the sea. I mean, I skipped over more criticism there of the limitations of the lyrics, etc. I'm surprised that this merited a critic's pick, honestly, because it's not an out and out rave. Let's go to another one. Let's go to Sarah Holdren's in Vulture. That's always a good read, and that apparently was a more mixed review. I will say though, before I move on, the point that Jesse Green makes at the end I think is very valuable to reflect on. Now, does this have something to say to the Broadway audiences of today? What do you take away from a story like Swept Away, this story of desperation and cannibalism? Sarah Holdren begins with a poetic first paragraph, then goes on to similarly explain the concept of the show and where it came from, despite his creative team's efforts to lace a capital T theme through the work. I think we're going to hear something similar here. Swept Away often falls prey to this roteness. Logan, with the support of Scott and Seth Avett and their bandmate Bob Crawford, has chosen salvation and redemption as the play's big idea, leaning a little into religious themes in order to do that. But its deployment is telly, not showy. We hear a lot about it, and our pulses never really rise with the stakes. Both story and character issues are to blame. Logan and Mayor are striving to mash up the economical with the epic, but their tale of shipwreck suffering and cannibalism stays constrained by its own plot points. It aspires to but never quite touches the Melvillian metaphysical grandeur. At the same time, the character who needs redeeming is one tough nut. With such a thick shell, it's questionable there's anything inside. Ultimately, Swept Away's most compelling elements exist around its center rather than within it. Along with Sands and Ensco, the show's buff, shaggy, dirty Henley wearing ensemble do a great job with David Neumann's manly maritime choreography. They clamber enthusiastically up rigging and swing on the ropes of Rachel Hauck's cleverly engineered set. It's as though these critics don't get to see men often the way that they write about them in some of these reviews, which is in itself perhaps the production's greatest triumph. I agree, agree, it's got a trick up its big wooden sleeve. That sounds painful for the eventual shipwreck. And when it comes, Mayer and his whole team pull off a piece of staging that does indeed summon the terrible and sublime. The sea's devilish brilliance and beauty pours through the space. It's temporary, but at least for a moment, we're swept up with it. Let me go before I tell you my feelings. Let's read at least one negative review for balance, of which I think there weren't that many. It's worth saying the Washington Post didn't like it, although, curiously enough, they seemed to like it, presumably a different critic. But back in 2023, they liked the show. Then they said, wherever the winds of show business may blow, Swept Away has proved itself worthy of a Broadway christening. When it got to Broadway, the same outlet said it gambled on a sinking formula. It sets the band's folksy sound to a grisly survival tale. It's a curious combination, with iffy results. The sink or swim question of why finds this motley morality tale, which played arena stage last year and Berkeley Rep in 2022, floating in murky waters. A flummoxed patron on the night I attended exclaimed afterward, what was the point of that? That's so interesting. We're going to get to that. That's the point of my thesis. I'm building towards it. I suspect it won't be an isolated sentiment. Could it be that relocating the port of departure to New England among whalers toiling in a dying trade has something to say about the plight of America's working class? Maybe. But the book by John Logan, a Hollywood screenwriter whose stage credits include Moulin Rouge, deals in stock characters and extreme situations. The doomed shipmates have only enough time during the intermissionless 90 minutes to announce themselves in broad strokes before they're sunk. It's tough to escape the feeling that the production and the audience are stranded together until it's over? There is a quandary about survival worth chewing on here, not the one on stage, but what we're all doing at the theatre these days and why. There's no one right answer, but arriving at a compelling one often means charting a less familiar course. I'm not entirely sure what he's trying to say with that concluding paragraph there, but I skim read the review, and possibly I'd get a better sense of it if I read the entire thing. Always interesting to see overlap and agreement even across reviews that drew very different interpretations. And I think this is one of those polarizing pieces of work. There's lots to celebrate about it. There's lots artistically being done very well in a show like Swept Away, the music is, like in many jukebox musicals of this style, more atmospheric than narrative boosting. We spend an awful lot of time waiting for something to happen, and then one thing does happen, and then we spend an awful lot of time waiting for death, like the characters do. It really is probably about a four sentence plot synopsis to explain the entire thing. And yet it's also, I agree, constricted in that sense because, you know, you have this clash of perspectives about morality and about religion and as soon as they're in the boat and the character of little brother, the younger of the two brothers, as you can tell, he is unwell. I can't remember if he's injured or just sick. He's not doing great in the boat. The captain, he feels so miserable about the fate of the majority of his crew, for which he feels responsible because he's the captain and mate. The first mate, the John Gallagher Jr. Character, is just determined to survive. And so they reach a point, having still not been found, with no sense of survival inside site, where he begins to broach the idea for himself of using his knife to kill and then subsequently cannibalize younger brother, who is unwell. Of course, younger brother's very protective, very religious brother is also on the boat with them and objects to this for multiple reasons as they then kind of come to terms with the fact that they may not have as much choice about this as they might look like. The really staggering moment of the thing, huge spoiler alert here, is that the older of the two brothers, even though it seems like he is about to take the knife and kill his brother personally, who has kind of like agreed to all this on the basis that it will help his older brother survive. Older brother kills himself in the boat instead in order to save the life of his younger brother. It's incredibly dark, it's incredibly shocking and brutal, and there's much that we could say about that, but they don't necessarily. They let it speak for itself, which also has value. But I sort of found this similarly frustrating, as I did Brokeback Mountain in the uk, which a lot of people enjoyed. I didn't, because I just thought it was underwritten. I just wanted there to be more conversation. But invariably when you get these kind of stoic, emotionally repressed, often male characters, they don't have a lot to say to each other. And that's before they're starving to death in A boat, which makes people famously low energy. And my favorite kind of a play is one where we can, you know, where we discuss the things, where we get into the meat of the thing. And this gets into the meat of the thing. But visually, that's an unfortunate metaphor, but you know what I'm saying? And brilliant performances notwithstanding, here is what I think is the real issue with Swept Away. This is why I think it's closing as early as it is. Not because of marketing, not because of not having celebrities in the cast, not because of a critical response, not just because of Broadway prices being what they are. I think the problem is word of mouth. Truly the most important thing for any Broadway show, especially in its early days, is word of mouth. You need people to be exiting that theater, theater, telling their friends, telling the other people in the community, telling the family members. You want that word of mouth, you want the news of that show to reverberate throughout the community. And so many people talk about this. The midtown Manhattan theater district is this fascinating little world where people go for dinner or drinks after the shows because places stay open. This doesn't happen in London. I could speak about this at length. And they go and talk about things or they'll say, like, oh, you saw that tonight. How is it? Oh, I might be seeing that next. How is that? Is this good? Oh, you first preview. Oh, how is this? It's this. I had this person. Was that like all of these conversations happening constantly. And with Swept Away, it. It's challenging because the word of mouth is really difficult because you end with this very bleak, very stark, pardon the pun, kind of a story where even though three of them survived the shipwreck, but at what cost? We find out about the circumstances of each of their deaths. And then finally, John Gallacher junior's character mate, he can find peace and he can accept the embrace of death. And I'm glad that that review mentioned one slightly puzzled patron who questioned the point of the whole thing. And truly, I think probably the biggest artistic misstep is not having a more evident emerging perspective or message or theme or something powerful and important to take away from it, other than, you know, cannibalism sucks and don't, don't go way with your brother. I just felt as though I was leaving this theater and I felt as though many people were leaving the theater a little quizzical, a little depressed, which is no bad thing. I'm not saying everything has to be joyous and uplifting, but something like appropriate, which is hard hitting and shocking. People were even going, oh, my God, wasn't that like. I was stunned by that. I could. The way that family spoke to each other and Sarah Paulson's performance. And eventually you can get to a place of like, oh, what the boat did. So cool. And John Gallagher Jr. Fantastic. And, yeah, I enjoyed, like, the visuals of it and the atmosphere and the music and it was all nice. But it does leave you immediately afterwards, I think, a little unsure of what to take from it and what to say to other people. And that's not good for word of mouth. I think that is Swept away and that has been Swept away's biggest problem. And there's probably more that we could say about this. There's probably more that I want to say about it. If I was to be reductive, I could say that the show is perhaps a little dull. Exciting things happen. But there is so much time before the exciting things happen and there is so much time after the exciting things happen until the next exciting thing happens. And so I think while it may have eventually found the tools to last a little longer on Broadway, it's like a fire, and if you can't successfully ignite at the beginning, then you've really got no hope of burning. Anyway, those have been my thoughts about the closure of Swept Away on Broadway, as well as some of my thoughts about the show creatively. Like I said, if you have any interest in seeing this for yourself, please, please, please go buy a ticket, support it prior to their final performance on December 15th. My thoughts again, with all of the performers, the cast, the creatives, the crew, everyone inside the building, everyone outside and beyond the building affected by this early closure. It can be a really challenging industry at the best of times and we are in early closure season, sadly, right now. Hopefully, with any luck, this fate does not befall too many other shows. If you see a show, if you're the kind of person who pays attention to grosses, buy a ticket for that show that you've been thinking about going to see. Recommend something, encourage other people to go and support theatre. I know it's expensive, I know it's inaccessible. If this is available to you, if this is within your means, give theatre as a gift. The holidays are coming up. Let's please, please, please try and support the industry. I will be doing the best I can and I hope that you will do as well, because we all love theatre. That's why we're here. Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed my thoughts on this. Feel free to share yours in the comment section. Down below. People often provide other fantastic insights into situations like this. And as much as I can say about it, I'm commenting on all of this, having seen the show once from the other side of the Atlantic, so it's very popular. Possible other people can suggest more insights as to why this is happening for this particular show. In the meantime, I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For 10 more seconds, I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.