Sting Never Gave Up on His Musical 'The Last Ship.' Now It's Back

EDITORS NOTE: Attn: N.Y.); (ART ADV: With photo.

Back in 2014, not even Sting could rescue his Broadway show, “The Last Ship.”

As the box office numbers dipped, he stepped into the production, hoping his fans would flock to the theater to see him onstage. But his time was limited because of a scheduled tour, so when that gambit fell short, the show was forced to close after 105 performances, costing its producers $15 million.

And yet “The Last Ship” has refused to sink. It has been staged in Salt Lake City, Toronto and Finland, and toured the United Kingdom in 2018. In 2020, it embarked on a tour of the United States but that was cut short by the coronavirus pandemic.

Now, after recent runs in Amsterdam, Paris and Brisbane, Australia, a revised production of “The Last Ship” is about to begin performances, with Sting on deck in a starring role, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, where it will be staged nine times over six days.

“Most plays don’t quite work, and then we never see them again,” Sting, 74, said in mid-March while sitting in his apartment’s music room high above Central Park South. “But I don’t conflate commercial success with excellence at all, and I’m fortunate enough to be able to test that theory.”

The show, set in the shipbuilding town of Wallsend in northeast England, where the singer-songwriter was born Gordon Sumner, is not only a love story but also an exploration of parent-child dynamics set against the tale (with roots in real incidents) of workers who are told that their shipyard is being closed. They respond by occupying the docks to build one final vessel to sail around the world.

This wasn’t my first time speaking to Sting about “The Last Ship.” When the show was about to open on Broadway more than a decade ago, he said it had already been “almost five years of my life that I’ve lived, ate, drank, slept this whole thing.” And it wasn’t the first project that had him revisiting his early years: He had examined his childhood, family and community via his 1991 album, “The Soul Cages,” and 2003 memoir, “Broken Music.”

“I think it’s therapy,” he said in 2014. “And perhaps I’ve done enough therapy about that part of my life.” (Reminded of this sentiment when we spoke this spring, he chuckled softly. “Well, clearly not,” he said.)

Though reviews of the Broadway production had been mixed, the show received two Tony nominations. “I loved it,” Sting said. “I’m sad it didn’t go on longer, but the economics were difficult. It wasn’t a commercial success, nor was it a failure. It was part of the process that let us arrive here, so I don’t have any pangs of regret.”

Producer Karl Sydow, who has backed three different versions of the show in the past decade, wrote in an email that when he saw “The Last Ship” on Broadway, he told Sting: “If there was any justice in the world, the show should be a big hit because the music deserved it -- but as we all know there is no justice in the world, nor is there any way of really knowing what is going to be successful.”

The material still feels close to the composer. “The characters are part of me -- they’re all parts of my history, parts of my personality,” said Sting, who plays the aging foreman Jackie White. “I’ve been unbelievably successful, but I’ve done it through hard work, and I got that work ethic from the community that I was brought up in. So it feels like I’m repaying a debt by telling the story of my community in an honorable way.”

The scope of the narrative, though, has been the part of the show that’s been second-guessed. (In his 2014 New York Times review, Charles Isherwood praised the “ruminative, haunting beauty of its score” and “vital performances,” but called the plot “unfocused and diffuse.”)

The current production includes several new and revised songs and a new book by playwright Barney Norris.

“It almost felt like a song cycle,” said Norris in a video interview. “And the question is, how do we integrate these narrative lines? I want to get the book of this show out of the way of the music.” (Sydow said his reaction to the original production was that “the music was brilliant, but the book wasn’t.”)

Sting said that “there haven’t been any drastic changes -- the meta story is still the same, but the loose ends that perhaps were left open are now being tied together.” In addition to making the piece more sung-through, he notes that the biggest alteration was switching the teenage child of the lead character, Gideon Fletcher, to a daughter from a son.

In general, Sting said, the show’s women have been given more agency. “At first it was a very sort of manly piece, and the women started to materialize in a much stronger way. And in fact, the agency of women provides the finale.”

Another notable change is the casting of reggae star Shaggy, whose previous collaborations with Sting include the Grammy-winning 2018 album, “44/876,” in the role of the Ferryman, complete with the incorporation of island rhythms into his songs.

In a video interview, Shaggy (who called Sting “the brother I never knew I needed”) said that adding his “Jamaican patois-isms” to the score made sense because many of the construction workers in England at the time came to the country from the Caribbean.

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These laborers, of whatever background, are at the center of the play’s setting in the era of Margaret Thatcher’s England. “There is this socialist heart beating in it, which is about collectivity and resistance,” Norris said.

Sting added that while “The Last Ship” is very much of its time, the idea of worker obsolescence and transforming economies resonates in 2026. “Even though it’s set in the 1980s,” he said, “there’s a contemporary anxiety that it addresses, and that’s redundancy -- being made expendable, or being thought of as expendable. I think everyone in society now is threatened by this rather sinister, looming AI thing. I’m not talking about AI at all, but we’re talking about jobs that give you an identity, give you a sense of purpose, and a community suddenly under threat.”

The artist’s dedication was brought up by his collaborators. “We have a running joke that he comes to watch the paint dry,” Shaggy said, reflecting on how Sting typically arrives at the theater several hours before he needs to be there. And when Sting isn’t onstage, Shaggy said, he can often be found in the wings, playing harmonica along with the band.

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For Sting -- who describes “The Last Ship” as “the most satisfying, complex, difficult, frustrating, glorious adventure” -- the musical represents not just his tribute to growing up in the shadow of a shipyard, but a culmination of his career, the ultimate extension and expression of his years writing “three-minute hand grenade” pop songs.

“My entire life has gone into this work,” he said. “My entire life, I’m beginning to feel, seems to be the ship, and all of the songs I’ve written outside of that may have been getting me ready to make this thing. The songwriting craft that I’ve developed was to get me here.”

Not that he has abandoned his work as a rock ‘n’ roller; he is alternating between the productions of “The Last Ship” and his Sting 3.0 tour, joined by guitarist Dominic Miller and drummer Chris Maas. “I walk offstage one night in the opera,” he said, “and then I go to a gig the next night.”

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A dozen years after it came to Broadway, Sting continues to be open to new ideas about staging “The Last Ship.” (The weeklong run at the Met dovetails with the institution’s need for new revenue streams during challenging financial times.) His current ambition for the show, though, is to see it produced successfully without relying on his own star power to sell tickets.

“We’re not ready for that yet, but the more it’s seen, the more familiar people are with the songs and the story, perhaps it will have a longer life,” he said.

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For now, Sting is committed to whatever it takes to keep “The Last Ship” afloat. “If I had to, I’d be out there with a sandwich board,” he said. “I love this play, and I’ll do anything to keep it going.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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