Sting is still ship-shape
Hit singer’s show may not have lived up to his hopes, but it helped end a musical dry spell for the star, performing in Dubai tonight
S ting’s ill-fated musical, The Last
Ship , which closed on January 24, may not have ignited Broadway, but the show had some personal payoffs for the 63-year-old singer-songwriter who performs a soldout show in Dubai at the Jazz Festival tonight .
The $15 million (Dh55 million) show, a musical allegory set in Newcastle, the hardscrabble, post-industrial English seaside city of his youth, featured a 29-member cast as little known as Sting is world famous, and marked his first try at composing a musical, one that has taken on the proportions of an intensely emotional, deeply personal mission.
For one, writing the piece 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, still in possession of the sleek build of a rock sensation half his age, in an interview in New York before the show closed.
“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.”
After a lunch meeting with lead producer, Rent veteran Jeffrey Seller, Sting says, “I went back to my apartment on Central Park West, sat down with a notepad and wrote the names of the people I knew, people I went to school with.”
Verses poured out of him, and the basics of the show were laid out, “all in one afternoon. Reams and reams.”
Since the mixed reviews that arrived after its October 26, 2014, opening night , The Last Ship , with its 20 Sting songs, lost about $75,000 a week. Such a statistic is usually the death rattle for a Broadway production. To Sting,