The Last Ship Broadway Reviews

In 'The Last Ship,' director Joe Mantello gives us one scene in which workmen stomp around (intense choreography by Steven Hoggett) and brandish blowtorches (big sparklers, actually) that literally scorch the air around them. But nothing really happens. Eventually, something like a ship is vaguely indicated when the stage rises, everybody jumps aboard singing, there's light from heaven, and a tsunami of sound envelopes us. It's all as visually stunning and earsplitting as Mantello's staging of 'Defying Gravity' in 'Wicked.'

At its core, The Last Ship poses a religious quest for redemption: Father Jim (Fred Applegate) hears Gideon's confession of sins of the flesh, drink, and foul talk. But hey, this father has a few foibles of his own. His heart is so big, he inspires Gideon and the entire community, characters we come to know and love in the pub, and at the ship yard where industry is closing, turning from the actual building of ships, the mainstay of these hearty, lively folk, to jobs akin to pencil pushing. The company, led by Jimmy Nail as Jackie White and Sally Ann Triplett as his wife Peggy, won't have it, and they rally to erect just one more ship, the last one, which, as in the epics of old, will carry a body out to sea.

Too realistic to be a fable and too incredible not to be jangled by the plot holes (How do the men get into the guarded, fenced shipyard every day? How are the materials for the ship brought in? Where the heck are they all sailing off to?) The Last Ship is soul-nourishing as a concert piece but only fitfully convincing as a total work of theater.

But if the structure is slack, the book indifferent, the love story lopsided, and the gender politics unreconstructed, Sting's folk-inflected songs, with their bright percussion and yearning strings, are a pleasure and they are performed here with vigour and swagger and joy. As the working men sing in the show's most rousing song, 'We've got nowt else.' Well, that's plenty. Underneath all the metaphors and self-consciousness and strange earnestness, there's a seaworthy show.

Sting brings it. The pop god delivers his A-game in 'The Last Ship,' a new musical about coming home and letting go that overflows with heart. Not bad for a Broadway debut as a composer. Chalk it up to beginner's luck. Or to decades of experience writing songs that tell stories. Either way, the rich and lively score, which includes two songs from earlier solo work, courses with meaning and emotion.

The songs, despite a few maudlin touches, are melodically and emotionally vital, offering potent vehicles for performers such as the wonderful Fred Applegate, cast as Father O'Brien, and Jimmy Nail, who plays a crusty veteran laborer, and whose smoky but siren-like voice evokes Sting's more nearly than Esper's. By the deeply affecting final scene, Gideon, Meg and the others have learned that love, in all of its forms, can involve letting go - of grievances, dreams, even people. That's hardly a novel concept, but The Last Ship makes it feel surprisingly fresh.

The musical's book, written by John Logan and Brian Yorkey, settles for simply pushing the story forward, from A to B to C. But the failure also falls on Sting, who created the inexpressive score, in his theater-writing debut. The songs permit the characters to reveal their feelings - 'I love you. I hate you' - but not who they are and why they have those feelings. And while there are some nice melodies, especially a gentle courting song, 'What Say You, Meg?' much of the score consists of thumping declarations and anthems. A lot of effort obviously went into 'The Last Ship,' with very little reward.

The biggest selling point of The Last Ship is also its greatest stumbling block: multiple Grammy winner and Tantra enthusiast Sting, who provides the music and lyrics to his first-ever Broadway show. Fans hoping for the same pop sensibility that turned 'I'll Be Watching You' and 'Desert Rose' into hits will be left wanting, as the bulk of Ship's songs lack the big melodic flourishes that stick around well after the curtain drops.

Sting's stage composing is nicely complex, mixing sassy ballads with brooding duets and big, violin-led crowd pleasers. Outstanding are 'Dead Man's Boots' and 'The Night the Pugilist Learned How to Dance,' which here is wonderfully staged between a father and son behind bars, and the simply beautiful title track, which the creators clearly know is good: It's leaned on no less than four times.

But along with its accomplishments, which include a host of vital performances from its ample cast under the direction of Joe Mantello, 'The Last Ship' also has its share of nagging flaws. The book, by John Logan ('Red') and Brian Yorkey ('Next to Normal'), and inspired in part by Sting's own upbringing in the northeast England town Wallsend, where the show is set, is unfocused and diffuse. It's hamstrung by a division between a David versus Goliath story - of the little folk fighting against the faceless forces of the global economy - and a romantic love triangle.

If sincerity and noble intentions were enough to make a good musical, 'The Last Ship' would be a smash. If haunting folk-tinged melodies and choruses of rousing determination could float this boat, Sting's heartfelt debut musical would justify the years he devoted to the $14 million epic about a depressed English shipbuilding town very much like the one where he grew up.

So what's missing? It's easy to see the central figure of Gideon Fletcher as a romanticized alter ego of Sting (Gordon Sumner at birth). But the plodding book by John Logan and Brian Yorkey gives him too little psychological dimension to come alive. It also strands him among generic characters and clichéd situations seen in countless Brit films set in depressed industrial towns blighted by Thatcherism. What's worse is that it falls back on that old standby of using allegory as an excuse for a plot that - sorry - simply doesn't float.

When the muscular ensemble is tearing into Sting's rueful ballads or jaunty barroom reels, you almost forget that the narrative stakes are exceedingly attenuated-unemployed shipwrights in a northern English town occupy a decommissioned factory to build one final vessel as an act of defiant solidarity. It's a nice gesture, a symbolic blow for the working man priced out of his profession, but book writers John Logan and Brian Yorkey don't quite establish what the lads hope to achieve-beyond a chance to drill their workplace shanty 'We've Got Now't Else' into our limbic system.

It's a familiar story that in lesser hands would quickly wobble under its weight. As it happens, a great cast, led by Esper and Rachel Tucker (a one-time West End Elphaba, in 'Wicked') as Meg, that one-time love, prevent that from transpiring. It's bracing to see Esper in a more adult, even paternal role, and it's one he pulls off with charisma. That Esper's Gideon must somehow make peace with his past, the abusive father and so on, is a foregone conclusion, but his methods of doing so struck me as exceedingly honest.

In a refreshing change of protocol, Sting has written a new score in a folk Celtic style, full of sweeping choral and orchestral arrangements and unabashed, open-hearted sentiment. The originality and sincerity of the enterprise are certainly worthy of applause. Joe Mantello's production manages to be thoroughly atmospheric without turning into a spectacle. (Spoiler alert: We only see a small portion of the ship.)

In other words, this is a grown-up musical the way Sting is a grown-up musician - offering literate, haunting ballads and well-crafted, pop-folky barnburners. It's also overly earnest and a wee bit grandiose. This duality is reflected in the show's two overlapping stories. One is very effective, the other not so much.

Sting lives up to his nickname, 'the King of Pain,' with 'The Last Ship.' Melancholy tones of sorrow and regret saturate this highly personal and intensely felt musical play, which is set in Wallsend, the industrial town in the north of England where the singer-songwriter grew up. The somber book by John Logan and Brian Yorkey takes place in 2007, the year the historic shipyard closed and the town lost its purpose and identity. The lyrical language of Sting's mournful score gives poetic voice to the distressed shipbuilders, but depicting their story as a heroic allegory is regrettably alienating.