Sting has returned to his musical The Last Ship with a substantially revised version set to play nine performances at the Metropolitan Opera House from June 9 to 14, 2026.
The new iteration includes a fresh book by Barney Norris and several new or rewritten songs by Sting. Multiple characters have been gender-swapped, including turning a son into a daughter, to increase the prominence of women in the story of a declining shipbuilding town.
Sting stars once again as Jackie White, while reggae musician Shaggy plays the Ferryman. The limited New York run follows earlier tour dates in Amsterdam, Paris, and Brisbane.
The original 2014 Broadway production closed after a brief engagement and lost roughly $15 million. Sting has said the revisions address storytelling issues that left some narrative threads unclear in the first version.
I never conflate commercial success or failure with excellence or, you know, inefficiency. It takes a while for a play to find its audience, to find its voice, to find itself. It's never finished. — Sting, musician and composer.
Sting described the motivation behind the gender changes in direct terms. There were too many men in the play anyway. The agency of women is so important to the plot. It’s the women who save the community, and when the men are in a complete mess, they come to the fore and save the day.
The revisions stem from Sting’s longstanding connection to Wallsend, the shipyard community in northeast England where he grew up. He has framed the work as a personal debt to that place and its people.
Performances across multiple cities since the original Broadway closing have given the creative team repeated opportunities to test and refine the material. Sting has noted that theatrical works require such time to settle into their final shape.
The Metropolitan Opera House engagement places the musical in an atypical venue for a Broadway title, yet the nine-show schedule aligns with the production’s current strategy of short, focused runs rather than open-ended commercial engagements.
