‘I Have an Advantage Over Verdi. He’s Dead.’

Sting resuscitates his critically divisive Broadway musical at the Met Opera.

The Last Ship starts on June 9.

When The Last Ship, a musical that serves as an elegy to Wallsend, the hardscrabble Northern England shipyard town Sting grew up in, debuted on Broadway in 2014, the critical reception was disappointing. Sting’s original music and lyrics drew praise — he earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Original Score — but the story, by separate book writers, was considered far too muddled. “If you fix one thing, it’s like putting wallpaper up,” Sting tells me. “You put a bit of sticking on there, you push, and then something else happens.” The Broadway run of The Last Ship closed in 2015 with $15 million in lost investments. He realized that several elements needed to change if he wanted another go-round, which he did; he felt he had a “personal debt” to the community that raised him to tell this story. “I know I have a reputation for not being collaborative, but I am,” he insists. “I take consensus and then someone has to make a decision. It’s usually me.”

We’re talking in his dressing room at the Metropolitan Opera House, where a heavily revised The Last Ship will be staged for nine performances beginning later this month.  It is the first time the Met Opera, amid intensifying financial woes, has lent its space to a fully staged production of a former Broadway musical. Sting will play the lead role of foreman Jackie White; his close friend Shaggy, whom he refers to as “a soul mate,” stars alongside him in a new supporting part as a “semi-spiritual ghost” called the Ferryman. Together, they help guide a narrative, set during the Thatcher era, that’s an allegory of a life that no longer exists. One of the show’s most radical changes from Broadway is switching the genders of a few characters from male to female. “I’d written a son of the lead character, Gideon, like an Odyssey. Him going back to meet Telemachus. I called him Terry at some point, but the interim director we had said, ‘No, let’s make that a girl.’ It completely transformed the relationship,” Sting says. “There were too many men in the play anyway. The agency of women is so important to the plot. It’s the women who save the community, and when the men are in a complete mess, they come to the fore and save the day.”

Sting had to reacquaint himself with writing for the stage and other people, as opposed to writing for only himself, with songs competing to make this final production. “Instead of sitting down and contemplating my navel and writing about my inner turmoil, my dark night of the soul, I’m writing for women, I’m writing for young girls, and I’m writing for older people,” Sting explains. “That really frees you up as a songwriter because I was getting a little stale with the navel-gazing thing. I said, ‘Quite enough about me.’” Of course, given its autobiographical nature, all of The Last Ship’s characters contain bits and pieces of its creator. “But it was freeing to not have to just sing about me for a change,” Sting says.

Prior to this short residency at the Met Opera, Sting brought The Last Ship on a world tour of sorts through Amsterdam, Paris, and Brisbane. He believes that the musical can be adapted for any type of environment or budget, which fuels his desire to never truly be finished with it. “We could play it outside. I’m willing to do it anywhere,” he says. “We can also reduce it, or we can do it as an oratorio. I have an advantage over Verdi. He’s dead.” However, there are some lines Sting won’t cross: He stresses he’ll never stoop so low as to back a “happy-clappy” jukebox musical of his work. “It’s just shoehorning a story around your hits,” Sting says of the genre. “I wanted to do something more difficult. I don’t think there’s any point in falling off the lowest rung of any ladder.” He is willing, though, to engage in some cheeky marketing to get more millennials to come to the operahouse: “I’m the guy from Bee Movie!”

In an unusual setup, Sting is concurrently touring The Last Ship with his Sting 3.0 band. He enjoys unwinding and drinking gin with Shaggy after a long day, because “we’re of an age where we don’t get any darker than that.” On a recent night off, he was able to attend a Dave Matthews Band concert for the first time; it was a “lovely kind of relaxed atmosphere,” which surprised him despite their “cult following.” When I mention he’s on a shortlist of candidates who could possibly be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame a second time, he’s unmoved: “Museums are for things that you stuff when you’re dead.” I have to remind him he’s very much alive and has already been inducted once as a member of the Police. “I don’t get the point,” he insists. “I don’t understand!”

As someone now in the fifth decade of his career, Sting has accepted a rite of passage that all rock stars must undergo when on tour. “If you play a concert and say ‘I’ve got a brand-new song,’ people are like, Oh yeah, time to go to the bathroom. They want to hear what they know,” he says. So far, with theater attendees, he has yet to deal with any poor audience behavior from those who might conflate The Last Ship with, say, a headlining gig at Madison Square Garden, which isn’t always the case when stars go to Broadway: “Once the play starts, people behave.” His only ambition, at 74, is “to survive.” But he wouldn’t mind writing another show, either, that’s an even larger spectacle. “You have to constantly be looking for novelty to keep yourself interested and challenged. I’d love to write another piece like this, but I haven’t found something that would be so personal to me and charged with emotion,” he says. “I’m here at the Met. Are you kidding? I’m fucking brave.”

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the June 1, 2026, issue of New York Magazine.

Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now to support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the June 1, 2026, issue of New York Magazine.