Despite a book that lists, Sting’s scores sails on

To use shipbuilding as an analogy for crafting musicals, the songs are the hull—the most visible part of the thing, taking up the most space. But you won’t sail far without a strong, even keel, the beam around which the hull is constructed—the book, in other words. With The Last Ship, a fervent, rollicking and often glorious new musical scored by Sting and inspired by the town of his youth, the hull is magnificent, the keel has problems. 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.