Sting takes decisive action to keep The Last Ship afloat
NEW YORK — Night after night, as the lights go down in the Neil Simon Theatre and musicians on guitar and flute and fiddle begin to play, a multiple Grammy Award- winning international star settles into a seat in a back row and drinks in anew all the Broadway sights and sounds.
It’s the closest that a guy named Sting will ever get to the life of an average Manhattan commuter.
“I watch it every day,” says the 63- year- old singer- songwriter. “I’m fascinated by the process and the actors making this story and the songs their own. I’m fascinated by the audience and how they react. I sit way in the back in the dark, sort of a phantom, and l leave before the lights go up.”
The event he’s stuck on is one out of his own dreams: The Last Ship, a musical allegory set in Newcastle, the hardscrabble, post- industrial English seaside city of his youth. The $ 15 million show, featuring a 29- member cast as little known as Sting is world famous, marks his first try at composing a musical, one that has taken on the proportions of an intensely emotional, deeply personal mission.
That he might want to find some way to separate himself is supported by the numbers: Since the mixed reviews that arrived after its Oct. 26 opening night, The Last Ship, with its
It’s one of the most important projects of his life, without question. KATHRYN SCHENKER STING’S MANAGER
20 Sting songs, has lost about $ 75,000 a week, according to its lead producer, Rent veteran Jeffrey Seller. Such a statistic is usually the death rattle for a Broadway production. To Sting, though, it was a call to action. Putting his star power further on the line, he is relinquishing his nightly seat in the dark for a perch up front and in the spotlight.
In hopes of saving the show, he is joining it.
So, after being feted as one of the year’s Kennedy Center Honorees in an upcoming ceremony, Sting will for the first time step into this Joe Mantello- directed musical, replacing his old friend Jimmy Nail, whom he lobbied to accept the featured role of Jackie White, a shipyard foreman who leads a band of unemployed workers on a quixotic boat- building quest.
The box office will no doubt boom during the weeks he plays Jackie. Still, he has to depart in late January, as he’s committed to a concert tour of Australia and Europe with his friend Paul Simon.
The uncertainty is, will his short residency be enough to turn the tide? Can Sting make The Last Ship last?
“It’s one of the most important projects of his life, without question,” says his manager, Kathryn Schenker, who has worked for Sting for 35 years. “The guy’s a fighter. He couldn’t live with himself if he did not give it every opportunity to live on.”
It’s in Sting’s competitive DNA to tow his Ship to safety. Maybe a bit of arrogance is built into this stubborn pursuit, or the appearance of it; though he sometimes strikes fans as aloof, his longtime aides say that no one is more loyal, or dependable. But this is also a labour occasioned by a lifelong sense of unfinished business.
Inspired by his early memories — not the least of which are of Rodgers and Hammerstein albums as the background music of his childhood — the show and its evocations of wayward sons and tense households are linkages to a past he’s still grappling with.
“I couldn’t have prophesied the emotional impact of this play both on myself and on audiences,” he says. “I think much more than perhaps I intended.”
Perhaps the fight for the musical is also such a crucial one for Sting because The Last Ship has irrigated a creative desert for him, the longest dry songwriting spell of his career.
“What preceded the writing of this musical was an eight- year period of not writing songs. A fallow period,” he says. “I had them before but never to this extent, which began to worry me. I mean, songwriting is a kind of therapy anyway: You’re digging stuff up. I felt I needed some therapy. Regression therapy is what I landed on, going back to my childhood, which was not particularly happy, dredging up stuff that perhaps I would have kept suppressed if I’d had my druthers.
“But there wasn’t any choice. There was a compulsion to tell this story and once I decided to do it, it was as if the songs had been kind of stuck there for a long time, almost fully formed.”
The Last Ship began its voyage several years ago after Seller, the producer, dined at Schenker’s house, and she mentioned Sting had entertained ideas of returning to Broadway.
A couple of months after that dinner, Seller says, Schenker called, reporting that Sting had read a newspaper story about the Gdansk shipyard, the site in Poland made famous in the 1980s by Lech Walesa. She told him, “‘ He’s inspired to somehow make a musical about those men, but make it about his hometown,’ ” Seller recalls. “I said, ‘ I’m in.’ ”
Verses poured out of Sting, and the basics of the show were laid out, “all in one afternoon. Reams and reams.” ( Two veteran writers for the stage, Brian Yorkey and later John Logan, would work on the show’s script.)
Having emptied his heart into the music, Sting is now going to sing it nightly, sing it for his own pleasure, an audience’s curiosity — and the suppers of everyone in the production, people he’s come to care about.
“I enjoy having hits,” he says over the phone a couple of days after his starring gambit has been announced. “I’d rather have a hit against the odds than a hit that obeys the formulaic rules. This is exactly the play I wanted to put on. It may be difficult, it may be ugly, but it’s the one I wanted to do.”