Sting’s ‘Last Ship’ Musical Again Runs Aground, This Time at the Met

Giddy was how I felt as the lights dimmed at this week’s US premiere of a new version of Sting’s musical “The Last Ship” — the first time the Metropolitan Opera has staged a full musical in its 143-year history. Sting — frontman of The Police, England’s own Bruce Springsteen and one of my childhood heroes — was starring. His co-star, reggae legend Shaggy, was more than welcome to bang on my bathroom door. What could go wrong?The show’s origin lies in Sting’s childhood. Originally Gordon Sumner, he grew up in Wallsend, in England’s industrial North East: “I lived in that street with a ship towering over our house,” he has said. “I would watch thousands of men walk to work every morning thinking, ‘Is that what I’m supposed to do?… I’m going to do everything in my power to escape that.‘”Sting returned to Wallsend in 1990 to find his parents dying and the Swan Hunter shipyard closing, a casualty of Margaret Thatcher’s de-industrialization. That visit produced his 1991 album “The Soul Cages,” which evolved into “The Last Ship.” The first version bombed on Broadway in 2014, closing $15 million in the red; a second toured the UK and Canada in 2018–19 to mixed reviews. This third iteration is rewritten by English playwright Barney Norris, featuring new and revised songs.All three productions share the same prodigal-son story. Sting’s alter ego is Gideon Fletcher (impeccably sung by Declan Bennett), a boxer who returns to his Tyneside home after 17 years to find his father dying — and a now-teenage child he sired with a woman he once loved, Meg (the superb Helen Hill). Sting plays Jackie White, the yard’s foreman, whose failing health mirrors his dying craft. When the yard is shut down by the government’s henchwoman, Baroness Tynedale — a chilling, power-dressed hybrid of the Iron Lady and Tory leader Kemi Badenoch — the workers resolve to build the last ship themselves.Norris, 39, and Sting, 74, have made three big changes. They have beefed up the female presence: Meg owns the bar where much of the action unfolds, and the women band together against the police. They’ve changed Gideon and Meg’s love-child from a boy to a girl, Ellen (the flame-throated Hannah Richardson, all Siouxsie Sioux snarl and swagger). That switch promised a daddy/daughter dynamic for which, from Lear and Cordelia to “Blade Runner 2049,” I have a soft spot. And they have sharpened the class war between the workers and the agents of Thatcherite capitalism.‘The Last Ship.’ Mark SeniorAlas these changes have made the story neither credible nor engaging. The class war felt outdated. The female empowerment was undercut by a pathetic final showdown between a picket line of wives and just two British coppers. The reunion of Ellen and her father could have been as powerful as Billy Bigelow’s ghost watching his daughter graduate in “Carousel.” But it was spoiled by one line in Ellen’s first chat with her dad: “So you are the missing limb in our family tree?”Sting and Norris threw the literary kitchen sink at the script — Hobbes, Felicia Hemans, even Dylan Thomas’s “do not go gentle into that good night,” deployed to accompany a leading character’s protracted death. Comedy is scarcer. The only joke that killed was a worker remarking that “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” to which Jackie/Sting retorted: “I wasn’t the foreman on that job.”What Norris doesn’t dare change is the MacGuffin. Building a ship — cringily named Utopia — to sail aimlessly into the North Sea is a tough mission to get behind. In “Kinky Boots,” another musical about workers facing market change, traditional shoemakers pivot to sexy high-heels. In “The Full Monty,” steelworkers reclaim their bodies with a spectacular striptease. I like a windmill-tilt as much as anyone, but surely there was a stronger — sorry — sting-in-the-tale?I had hoped the music would be a glorious hybrid of pop, reggae, jazz, Northumbrian folk and choral writing, unified by an iconic voice. No such luck: the closest songs to being hummable — let alone showstoppers — were two numbers Sting pulled from his own laundry basket: “When We Dance” (1994) and “Ghost Story” (1999). One new song, “The Night the Pugilist Learned How to Dance,” touchingly accompanied Gideon teaching his newfound daughter her parents’ first dance, driven by Mick McAuley’s melodeon, the button accordion of the North East’s pubs.The excellent orchestra was mostly wasted: all but three performed backstage rather than in the Met’s spectacular pit. Among the visible was Kathryn Tickell, the world’s greatest player of the Northumbrian smallpipes — perfect for evoking Wallsend’s ashen skies and terraced streets — yet given little time to play.The blame lies with director Leo Warner, whose 59 Productions studio produced the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony and the superb “War Horse.” This set, though, was a dud. Sting had promised something “overpowering — it’s a real ship, and we launch it.” I expected the hull to roll forward and fly over the stalls, like the dementors in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” Instead, the final scene revealed the ship to be a video projection of an unmanned tanker, going nowhere.The show’s main redemption was Sting himself. It would never have been produced without him, and I doubt it will reappear. His haunted face peers down from seemingly every NYC subway station, his charisma remains awe-inspiring, and his acting is strong and sincere: a man singing his own history.I’ve been listening to that voice since I was a teenager, in love with the taut, dangerous tenor of “Roxanne” and “Message in a Bottle.” His solo career revealed deeper complexity: the magical lute songs, the Algerian rai of “Desert Rose,” the anti-Pinochet courage of the Spanish-language EP “Nada como el sol.” The voice is still pitch-perfect, shifted from the crystalline purity of “Fields of Gold” to a sandpapery rasp, and still unparalleled at lulling us into a world where all our dreams can come true.The cast were musically brilliant. Cassiopeia Berkeley-Agyepong, as the Baroness, pulled off a miracle by turning a preposterous line — “Capital floweth like water, it goeth where it may” — into a stirring free-market anthem. Shaggy overcame a doozy of a role — the Ferryman, a pandering character inspired by Charon — revealing a rich, operatic vocal skill.If shoehorning Shaggy into the show was meant to attract a younger, more diverse, audience to the Met, then judging by the performance I attended it cannot be said to have succeeded. Many of the audience were in their 60s, peering dutifully at seatback subtitles to decipher the Northumbrian dialect, and shuffling out exhausted after three hours.“The Last Ship” plays until Sunday at the Met before sailing to London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane in September, and then to Amsterdam’s Royal Carré. “Afraid to fail,” Gideon sings near the end, “a mast without a sail.” That captured the whole venture. With no compelling story, Sting continues to plough the sea. Most writers of musicals create at least ten stories before succeeding. Maybe Sting should stop polishing this turd and move on. How about a sexy Cinderella tale of a tantrically trained but tormented lady of the night: “Roxanne!”

Sting’s ‘Last Ship’ Musical Again Runs Aground, This Time at the Met

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