<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"When Sting was a little boy growing up in Wallsend, England, a shipbuilding town, his mother dressed him up, put a Union Jack in his hand, and led him down to the docks. Celebrities didn\u2019t visit his small town, recalls the pop star, but royalty did since among their duties was to christen the huge ships built on the sweat of his family\u2019s working-class friends and neighbors. As the massive Rolls Royce of the Queen Mother rode its stately way through the narrow streets, Sting, then known as Gordon Sumner, waved to her. And she waved back.&amp;nbsp;Making that eye contact, Sting has said, left an impact. \u201CI was infected with something. I was infected with this idea: \u2018I don\u2019t want to be on the street. I don\u2019t want to end up in that shipyard. I want to be in that car.\u201DSting, of course, went on to make pop music history but throughout his success, he was haunted by the tough and seasoned men that he left behind, the memories of the unfinished hulls rising in the North England sky. Now he\u2019s recaptured those memories in his latest album, \u201CThe Last Ship,\u201D a cycle of songs that has formed the basis of a musical, which arrives on Broadway this fall after a Chicago summer tryout. A preview of the story and its inspirations is being offered on February 21 in a concert version aired as a part of Channel 13\u2019s \u201CGreat Performances,\u201D performed by Sting and a 14-piece band.The show was taped last fall&amp;nbsp;at the Public Theater, where it has been in development for the past several years in collaboration with the Tony-winning team of director Joe Mantello (\u201CWicked\u201D) and book writers John Logan (\u201CRed\u201D) and Brian Yorkey (\u201CNext to Normal\u201D).&amp;nbsp; The concert of the \u201CThe Last Ship\u201D stirred a lot of buzz as an intimate romance that unflinchingly looks at the hard lives forged in the blistering heat and noisy roar of the shipyard furnaces. As Sting himself tells it in the TV special \u2014 during which he described the aforementioned eureka with the Queen Mum \u2014 the show centers on Gideon, a charismatic, cynical, and combative man who fled the town in his youth and has come back for some unfinished business that apparently includes an ex-wife and her husband, a rich industrialist.\u201CIt\u2019s not easy,\u201D he said of writing a musical. \u201CEvery song fights for its life\u2026 and the landscape is strewn with the bleached corpses.\u201D An apt enough analogy, as the songs themselves are vivid with the infectious reels that he must have had heard as a little boy as well as the nostalgia for a lost time of men ennobled by their craft and frustrated by their limited means of expression. Think, perhaps, of \u201COnce\u201D meeting \u201COn the Waterfront.\u201D If the album is any indication, the show smells like a big fat hit. By the way, you should download the special edition version of the album. You wouldn\u2019t want to miss \u201CShow Some Respect,\u201D one of the best songs ever written for the theater.&amp;nbsp; Unsurprisingly, it is in the whiskey-sodden, balls-out tradition of Kurt Weill (\u201CThe Alabama Song\u201D), since Sting\u2019s last Broadway outing was performing as Mackie Messer in the 1989 revival of \u201CThe Threepenny Opera,\u201D which also featured Cyndi Lauper, another Broadway newbie (\u201CKinky Boots\u201D). &amp;nbsp;Sting\u2019s songs have much more heart and affection in them, however, than the Poet of the Weimar Germany. Once you hear \u201CShow Some Respect,\u201D you\u2019ll be hard-pressed to get it out of your head. And you wouldn\u2019t want to:\u201CThese bonds we\u2019ve spliced together, will face all kinds of weather,Considered altogether, and sailing Hell for leather,We\u2019ll quit this quay,And we\u2019ll cast this net of souls upon the sea.Where will you be,When we cast this net of souls upon the sea?\u201D"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1005536/stings-the-last-ship-heads-to-broadway-this-fall>