Revised ‘Last Ship’ still taking on water
Sting’s well-meaning musical suffers from cliches, bland story
You have to admire Sting. He doesn’t want to be known just as a wildly successful frontman for the Police or a solo rock star. He wants to move beyond his 17 Grammys, his international tours and his Tuscan villas by earning respect as a Broadway composer. It’s not the usual route for superstars, but hey, it has worked for Elton John and Cyndi Lauper. So, Sting’s debut musical, “The Last Ship,” would be inspired by his childhood in the beleaguered northern England shipbuilding towns near Newcastle. The musical would also fall short of becoming a hit. In fact, it flopped. Undaunted, Sting decided to start over. He cut songs, added songs and basically got rid of the original book by John Logan and Brian Yorkey, replacing it with new text by Lorne Campbell, who would also direct this new version. Feeling like he’s finally gotten it right, Sting launched the new “Ship” in England and Canada, and for its short American tour, he has stepped into one of the leading roles himself. That’s the production that has opened at the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco Tuesday as part of the BroadwaySF season. The bad news is that “The Last Ship,” as well-meaning and mildly entertaining as it is, will never be a great or even very good musical. The whole enterprise is mostly grim and dreary, with competing plotlines involving soapy melodrama, economic downturn and labor strife. There’s even a character with a cough, which you know means that person won’t live to see the finale. The story about how the shipyard men and the women who love them fight against the forces that are putting them out of business is meant to celebrate the indomitable human spirit. But it all comes across as a shallow gloss on how the downtrodden can fool themselves into a happy ending if they speechify and sing in beautiful choral unison while stomping about in a robust Celtic manner. While the book never makes a convincing case for any of its plotlines — the wayward teenage love story, the shipyard closure, the family medical drama — there is some pleasure to be had in Sting’s score and the performances, especially by the women of the company. Frances McNamee finally brings the show to life mid-Act 1 with “If You Ever See Me Talking to a Sailor,” a defiant, fiery number for a woman who refuses to accept the role she’s expected to play in a seafaring town. At the top of Act 2, the women perform together again led by Orla Gormley as Mrs. Dees, a reluctant lover of shipyard men who knows her way around a musical rant. There’s a sad duet for a shipbuilding father and the son who wants to escape the family business in “Dead Man’s Boots” and a genuine attempt at old-fashioned musical comedy in “When the Pugilist Learned to Dance.” But then there are songs that prattle on about underground rivers and islands of souls that are simply bland. Sting does himself no favors by saddling his shipyard supervisor character with one of the show’s worst songs, “So to Speak,” which belabors the “ships are life” metaphor to the point you long for a torpedo. When you can understand what he’s saying or singing, Sting is a reasonably charismatic presence onstage — this is Sting, after all, even under all that tweed. His character lacks compelling definition, and he’s easily upstaged by the romantic leads, McNamee and Oliver Savile, who are much livelier, even if their characters seemed to have stepped out of a Hallmark movie. That’s especially disappointing because McNamee’s Meg seems like she’s going to buck musical theater stereotypes and not give in to the requisite romance. She’s going to do things on her own terms. Until she doesn’t. The physical production, dominated by moody projections (credited to 59 Productions), mostly works well to create a sense of place, while the cast of 18 makes for a sparse representation of thousands of shipyard workers. Still, we do get a sense of place. The music, however, never gives us a sense of the time — 1986 — settling instead for a mild folk sound complete with fiddle and melodeon and a vocal blend that sounds like the last song of Broadway’s “Billy Elliot,” a much livelier musical on a similarly grim subject (striking coal miners). “The Last Ship” doesn’t sink exactly, but Sting’s heavily constructed and reconstructed musical vessel is still foundering in theatrical waters.