Entertainment

Sting’s Broadway-bound musical gets a reading

Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler, have become fixtures on the Broadway red carpet, attending the openings of “Lucky Guy,” “Motown” and “I’ll Eat You Last.”

What’s the old pop icon doing around the Great White Way?

Why, he’s peddlin’ his wares!

Sting has a new musical in the works — “The Last Ship” — and he’s out and about charming theater owners and investors. He and his co-producer, Jeffrey Seller, are beating the bushes for the $15 million it’ll cost to bring the show to Broadway next spring.

They presented a staged reading Friday for the usual heavy-hitters. Sting’s written the music and lyrics (but does not appear in it). John Logan (“I’ll Eat You Last”) has taken over book duties from Brian Yorkey (“Next to Normal”), who, I hear, wasn’t moving as fast as director Joe Mantello would have liked.

When Mantello cracks the whip, you’d better get crackin’ at the keyboard.

Yorkey’s still billed as co-writer — he showed up at the reading — but Logan’s doing all the work now, sources say.

Based on Sting’s album “The Soul Cages,” “The Last Ship” is about a family of shipbuilders who face a bleak and uncertain future when the shipyard they’ve worked in for years is forced to shut down. The cast included Louise Pitre, Fred Applegate, Aaron Lazar, Jill Paice and Matthew Stocke.

Sting has drawn on elements from his own life for the show. He grew up in Newcastle, England, the son of a milkman and a hairdresser. He went to school with kids whose fathers worked in the shipyards, most of which are long gone, killed off by global competition.

My spies say his score is moody and reflective and contains several haunting themes. The songs, though, do “start to sound alike after awhile,” one person says. The first act is a little slow off the mark, I’m told, but the second delivers an emotional wallop. Some in the audience (mainly women, I must report) were dabbing away tears at the finale.

“It’s got that ‘Billy Elliot’ thing going on — you know, working-class people who maintain their dignity in the face of adversity,” says a source, who didn’t cry.

A couple of potential investors question the show’s commercial viability. “It’s an art musical,” one says. “It’s a very good art musical, but I think it belongs at the Public Theater.”

Another adds: “I admired it a lot, but it’s not for the ‘Motown’ crowd.”

Still, as one theater executive points out, “Once” is an arty musical, too — and it won the Tony and is making a nice little packet on Broadway. Then again, unlike “The Last Ship,” it didn’t cost $15 million.

Sting hasn’t been around Broadway since he starred in an ill-fated revival of “The Threepenny Opera” in 1989. It was directed by the great John Dexter, who, sadly, was dying at the time. (He did an interview with me lying flat on his back on the stairs of the Lunt-Fontanne.) Frank Rich called the production a “gray mass” and described Sting’s Macheath as “monotonous.” The show ran two months.

Here’s hoping Sting fares better with “The Last Ship.” It represents something of a breakthrough for him. He suffered from writer’s block for several years, but managed to pull himself out of the slump working on this show. I don’t know what triggered the slump — I’ll ask him the next time I run into him at a Broadway shindig — but I bet it had something to do with that disastrous Disney cartoon, “The Emperor’s New Groove.” Sting was hired to write the songs, but Disney executives rejected them. The 2000 movie, which ended Disney’s string of animated hits from the 1990s, was released with nary a song. Sting said: “At first I was angry and perturbed. Then I wanted some vengeance.”

He got it in the form of a hugely entertaining documentary called “The Sweatbox,” directed by his wife, Trudie. It captures the screaming matches and bullying that went on during the making of “The Emperor’s New Groove.” It’s never been released — Disney owns the rights — but years ago I saw a bootleg copy, and I remember reveling in its viciousness.

If Trudie Styler slips me a copy, I’ll make sure “The Last Ship” wins the Tony next year!