Sting and Brian Yorkey's New Musical The Last Ship Sets Course for Fall Reading

The Last Ship, a musical collaboration between rock star Sting and Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning librettist Brian Yorkey, is planning a reading for October, according to The New York Times. The show features music and lyrics by Sting and a book by Yorkey, who will also direct. The musical is reportedly set in the singer-songwriter's childhood home of Newcastle, England and features a leading character who grew up around the shipyards of that city.

The project is the first experience in musical theater writing for Sting, a 16-time Grammy Award winner both for his solo work and as a member of The Police. "It’s Sting’s first foray into writing for musical theater,” Yorkey told the Times, “So we wanted to start having him meet actors and hear them sing at the earliest possible point." Yorkey, along with collaborator Tom Kitt, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Score for his work on Next to Normal.

The score of The Last Ship is reportedly incomplete at this time, but as Yorkey told the Times, Sting has “maybe 20, 24, amazing new songs for the show. He’s writing great theater music. It’s very, very distinctly Sting, but it also is theater music. It’s not just pop music transposed into the theater.”