Between Sting and the Deep Blue Sea
Sting, seventy-four and wiry, recently emerged from a dressing room in a gloriously windowed studio at David Geffen Hall, at Lincoln Center, wearing navy coveralls and work boots. “I’m pretending I’m a working man,” he said. Sting plays a shipyard foreman in his musical “The Last Ship,” newly retooled and coming to the Metropolitan Opera House; that day, he was performing songs from it for Lincoln Center’s Sidewalk Sessions series, in which musicians behind glass are observable to passersby. Sting sat on a stool, parked a foot on a wood block, got tended to by a makeup artist, and picked up a hand-painted acoustic guitar made by a luthier in Kent. He appeared to be floating above Broadway. He played “All This Time,” from 1990, singing of a river, fog, shire horses, and burial at sea, sounding warm and clear and looking like a slightly weathered version of his Police-era self. Outside, a Heinz-bean truck rolled by, onlookers did double takes, and a man wheeled an upright bass to the subway stairs. Sting sang the delicate title song in a Northern brogue (“They’re launchin’ a boat on the morrow at noon”) and a fire engine blustered by, sirens howling. Sting played the tune again and said, “I miss the ‘wee-oh, wee-oh.’ ”
Afterward, in a lofty room called the J. P. Morgan Music Box, he sat in a modernist chair by more glorious windows and kicked back with some coconut water. “Electrolytes,” he said, with satisfaction. “The Last Ship” was inspired by the shipyard community in his home town, Wallsend, where Hadrian’s Wall ends, in the North of England. His coveralls (“In Britain, we call this a boilersuit”) resembled what his grandfather, a shipwright, wore “every day of his life”—even at church, even in retirement. “I was born in a surreal industrial environment,” Sting said. “As a child growing up, the end of my street would be blocked by a giant ship. Some of the largest vessels ever constructed on earth were built there. The sun would be blocked out by these giant hulls towering over the house. The shipyard was infernally noisy and dangerous, with terrible toxic chemicals, asbestos and the like. I’d watch thousands of men walk to work every morning.” He’d also grudgingly help his dairy-manager father deliver milk. On such mornings, he said, “I’d dream a lot, and I dreamt about being a musician.” London dignitaries would come for ship launches, “to smash the champagne bottle against the hull, and members of the Royal Family would come down our street and wave. I thought, That’s an indication of a bigger life. That’s the kind of life I want—not royalty, but it gave me an ambition.” An emigrating family friend gave him a guitar, which he played obsessively, and he got a scholarship to a grammar school in Newcastle. He saw both as a way out.
By the mid-eighties, Sting had sold tens of millions of records, with the Police and solo. In 1987, both his parents were dying, and he returned home; the shipyard was struggling, too. “I saw the shipyard and thought, That’s quite a metaphor.” His parents died that year, and the shipyard closed a while later. The converging losses led to Sting’s 1991 album, “The Soul Cages”—not a fan favorite, though it has “a constituency of the recently bereaved.” He also saw something theatrical in it: “The shipyard has an operatic scale.” In 2011, he dug in, writing stanzas for a foreman, a riveter, a welder, and others, and composing a score informed by “the local folk music, very Celtic”; sea chanteys; and classic musicals, which he’d listened to growing up with his mother, a Rodgers and Hammerstein fan. (“The daisies in the dell / will give out a different smell,” he sang, recalling Pore Jud.) The current “Ship” has a new book, some new songs, and Sting’s collaborator and pal Shaggy, the boombastic reggae star, who plays a mischievous ferryman.
The Met hasn’t mounted a Broadway show before. Sting, who has performed there, is excited to return. “On an iconic stage, you bring all of the history with you,” he said. “ ‘Wow, Pavarotti sang here!’—who was a friend of mine. He was a bit of a lad.” One day, Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler, visited Pavarotti in Italy, and the King of the High C’s took them waterskiing. “It was quite choppy, the Adriatic that day,” Sting recalled. He was on skis; Pavarotti drove the boat, Styler alongside him, “like Bluto and Olive Oyl,” Sting said. “Popeye here was hanging on for dear life.” After ten minutes, he fell, and Pavarotti zoomed on. “They’re going off into the sunset, he’s singing ‘Traviata’ or something, and her eyelids are fluttering.” He reënacted waving an arm, SOS style: “ ‘Hey, I’m dying!’ Eventually, they got me.” ♦