LOS ANGELES – The Last Ship has sailed into Los Angeles, with Sting himself at the helm.

The multiple Grammy-winning artist wrote the music and lyrics for the show, which opened on Broadway in 2014. He is obviously no stranger to songwriting having penned some of the most well-known songs around the world, but working on a musical, he says, was much harder.

“It’s difficult to fly a 747. It's difficult to perform brain surgery. It's more difficult to do a play believe me," he laughed.

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For Sting, this show is a labor of love, a deeply personal story rooted in his own experience of growing up in the shadow of a shipyard in Wallsend.

“This was the view out of my house as a child," he explained, sitting in front of the set. "I used to watch thousands of men walk down to the hill to the river every morning and work on the shipyard, and I thought that would be my destiny and I wanted to do everything in my power for that not to be the truth.”

The irony, he says, is that now he is right back here, telling the very story he never wanted to be a part of.

“I realize it’s my job to tell the story of my community because I need to honor where I come from," Sting said. "It’s what happens to a community when work is taken away."

This production of The Last Ship is quite different from the Broadway version.  Director Lorne Campbell worked closely with Sting to rewrite the musical’s book for a production in Newcastle in 2018.  

“What’s so amazing in Newcastle, the communities and the shipyards are right next to each other," Campbell said. "So you’d have this run of little domestic terrace houses and then at the end of it this vast ship looming up in the sky.”

He says for audiences there, it was vital that the show truly represent its place and time.

“When you saw these towns and communities really built around heavy industry devastated as those industries began to go away," he said.

They also drew inspiration from other real-life events like the demonstrations held by the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in the 1970s. Many of the cast members have lived through these events, or similar ones in more recent history.

"Joe Caffrey who plays our shop steward Billy Thompson in the show, his dad worked in the yards his whole life. We’ve got Sean Kearns from Belfast where the big yard in Belfast closed down last year," Campbell said, "This story is still rolling. At the heart of the show this question of what is owed to you as a working community.”  

The staging of this show is also completely redesigned with the extensive use of projections that were still being tweaked during previews. Eighteen projectors in all, sometimes overlapping to create layers of images.

“It’s a very complex and ambitious video show," Campbell said.

That plus thousands of lighting cues and 35 live microphones on the actors and musicians, it’s no wonder Campbell refers to the technical team as wizards.

“So yeah, it’s quite a beast," he joked.

Having all these cutting-edge tools enhances the storytelling, but despite the bells and whistles, Campbell says at its heart, this is a show about people, and a story he thinks American audiences will relate to.  

“You could essentially take the story of this show and make exactly the same show about Detroit, about a city that was grown around an industry, about generations of men and women who knew that if you worked, if your trained yourself, there was a job for you in that factory and suddenly through no fault of your won that deal doesn’t exist anymore," he explained. "How do we go on and if this community isn’t a community of ship builders or car builders, what are we?”

The Last Ship will actually play in Detroit, which is currently the final stop of the tour, and Sting is scheduled be in every performance as they move from port to port.  Having played in enormous arenas around the globe, he says he is grateful to theatre audiences, who unlike concertgoers, aren’t clamoring for his greatest hits.

“The theatre is the one place where they will come and sit in the dark and listen to new material," he explained. "They’ll hear new melodies and hear new lyrics and listen intently. So for me it’s a great privilege to have, it’s not normal.”

Unfamiliar seas perhaps for this rock star but he seems to be navigating quite naturally.

“It’s a ship with all of these moving parts and they all have to be pointing into the same direction," Sting said. "It takes a long time to align everything so it works.  But when it does work, boy it’s exciting.”

The Last Ship is playing at the Ahmanson Theatre through February 16.