Ever since our Newcastle friends, Mike and Joanne, told us about The Last Ship, and showed us the British telecast of the concert reading of the album by Sting and some of his musical friends when we were in Newcastle in July, we had been looking forward to seeing it.  When we found out that it was headed to Broadway, we ordered tickets from there, even before we got on the plane to come home.  I insisted on preview tickets, because it wasn’t at all clear to me that the show that would resonate with the New York audience, and many a show has closed in the first few days.  Sting’s comments in the album liner notes indicated that he was prepared for the possibility that the piece would not be a commercial success.  His album, Soul Cages, written after his parents’ deaths was not as popular as some of his other work.  It is nice not to have to worry about all of one’s work making huge money.  The freedom to do exactly what you want is wonderful.  That is the reason I am looking forward to retirement: no work need yield money, the two things become completely independent of each other.

Not that the music wasn’t good.  Sting is a reliable and creative songwriter, after all, but we weren’t sure that the demise of the ship building industry in Newcastle would capture the imagination of the well heeled New Yorker.  I figured it could easily go either way.  As the “merch” guy said when we entered the theatre, it’s all about the universal themes.

The show is highly ambitious.  It is no small feat to capture the death of an entire industry and the effect that has on the community so deeply dependent and intertwined with it.  This is not the first work to deal with the loss of industry in the UK.  Kinky Boots, and The Full Monty are a couple of others.  There will be some similarities among all of these of course.  In The Last Ship, the shipyard men decide to build one more ship as a legacy before the work goes to Korea, and wherever else.  There are so many aspects of this story that could be treated, no one work could contain them all and treat them well.  The political story, the Tory decisions to destroy the industries of the British working class, the breaking of the unions by Margaret Thatcher, those are not specifically addressed in this play. Sting chooses not to delve into the reasons for this destruction.  He leaves alone the politics of the decision, on a national political level, to destroy a series of industries, and the Northern economies that depended on them.  Fair enough, one can only do so much at once.  That is a different type of story.

The focus, rather, is on the impact on a community.  There is the interesting additional layer of the sometimes negative impact that the culture of that community can have on people living it.  The lead character, Gideon, left his family, his community, his love, willing to relinquish whatever necessary to have a different life.  Gideon left in anger, as did Sting, determined to get out, and his eventual need to circle back around to incorporate the parts of himself that his decision had severed.  Interestingly, the woman he left behind has taken up with one of the few who is figuring out how to rebuild from the ashes of the industry, make a life after its end, which of course the entire region was eventually going to have to do.

The hard parenting, the limited choices, the physical danger and perpetually low wages with no chance of advancement, the embittering lack of support for any ambition, make for a very ambivalent picture.  Gideon comes back in time to observe the demise of a life he hated and desperately wished to escape.  A lifetime of work on the slipway would never better a family, the opportunities for women were few, parents were hard on their children, and talent in so many areas atrophied and died due to lack of nurturing.  If that had not been so, Sting, and people who shared his need for something better, something more, would not have struggled so hard to leave that life behind, no matter the cost of doing so.  This story has particular resonance for us because my partner of 24 years did the same thing, leaving Newcastle with 2 suitcases to escape the limits of her working class community.  A good decision on her part, without which her professional and personal accomplishments, and even a normal lifespan, would have been impossible.  And yet, this can never happen without a cost.  Sting also cut ties and moved on, leaving his old life and the community that raised him far behind.  There is nothing black and white about these questions.

The music, though very Sting-like, translated beautifully to the Broadway style stage.  There are catchy hooks, rousing anthems, romantic songs, nice pieces for supporting characters.  For someone who hadn’t written in that genre before, the requisite high points were all hit.  One must suspend disbelief when really thinking about the possibility of making a last ship.  What would it be for?  Who owns it?  What will its purpose be?   Who will take care of it?  But the longing for continued purpose and closure is metaphorical, and many shows before have asked for this kind of indulgence.  After all, most musicals feature people bursting into spontaneous song, and that in itself demands the suspension of disbelief.  This is a wonderful work, and if there is some difficulty integrating all of the components into a single piece, well life is never a simple convenient story with a beginning, middle and end, in which one storyline at a time plays out.  And through this work, the world gets to hear the story of a proud people with a proud history, a community that doesn’t get a great deal of attention, even in the southern parts of its own nation.