Sting to Rock Public Theater Benefit Concerts with Songs from B'way-Bound The Last Ship

International pop star Sting will headline a series of 10 benefit concerts at the Public Theater this fall featuring songs from his new album The Last Ship, portions of which will reportedly be featured in a forthcoming Broadway musical play of the same name. Billed as “the first and only time” that Sting will perform his new material, the concerts will be held at the 260-seat Anspacher Theater from September 25 to October 9. The album is set for release on September 24.

Drawing inspiration from the shipbuilding community of Wallsend in the North East of England where he was born and raised, Sting has reportedly re-created a close-knit community of original characters. According to a news release, the concerts will include storytelling and visual projections paying homage to the area Sting grew up in, with music from pub-like folk tunes to a wall of sound from Sting’s full band, many of whose members also hail from the North East.

As previously reported, Sting has been collaborating for several years with John Logan (I’ll Eat You Last) and Brian Yorkey (Next to Normal) on a theatrical version of The Last Ship. 

“Before I began writing for this project, I hadn’t written anything in about eight years,” Sting wrote in a June 5 blog entry for The Huffington Post. “I’d lost the urge to create—the urge that had driven me most of my life. But once I decided to turn these memories of my childhood into a narrative, and began to think of writing for other people—for other characters, from other viewpoints apart from my own—the songs came very quickly.... The play for The Last Ship will not debut on Broadway until 2014, though my hope is that people find this material interesting, as a document of the process, rather than the finished product.”

No further information about dates, casting or creative team members for a theatrical production of The Last Ship have been released.