STING'S musical The Last Ship has docked at Leeds Grand Theatre this  week and will sail on to York Theatre Royal from June 25 to 30.

The show will be reviewed for its York run, but an early sighting in Leeds showed it to be ship shape, with moving songs,a politically powerful message, towering projections, not a little Greek mythology and some fantastic, committed, impassioned performances. 

It marks a homecoming venture for the Police man born Gordon Matthew Sumner on October 2 1951 in Wallsend, Tyne and Wear, where he grew up in the turmoil of the ship-building industry as the eldest of four children of Audrey (Cowell), a hairdresser, and Ernest Matthew Sumner, an engineer and milkman.

His grandfather was a shipwright, and Sting could see the ships being built at the end of his street, and it was his memories of those days that prompted The Police frontman to tell "the proud story of when the last ship sails".

Returning to his roots, Sting depicts the collective defiance of a community facing the demise of the shipbuilding industry, alongside a poignant romantic tale of childhood sweethearts and the adults they become.

"My Geordie voice is what comes out when I get angry; otherwise it doesn't, or when I talk to my brother it comes back," he told an invited audience at The Last Ship's February 15 launch day at the Leeds City Varieties Music Hall, where he joined cast members Richard Fleeshman, Charlie Hardwick and Joe McGann to perform songs from the show and take questions.

Sting's Geordie anger certainly comes out in The Last Ship, although the show first opened on Broadway, attaining a Tony nomination for Sting's score and lyrics that included Island Of Souls, All This Time and When We Dance, when running for 29 previews and 105 performances before a final voyage on January 24 2015, by which time Sting had joined the cast in December.

While it would be wrong to say the show ran aground in Sting's adopted city of New York, nevertheless three years on, it has found its more natural home, opening to five-star reviews at Northern Stage in Newcastle in March. It will surely resonate in the industrial city of Leeds and in York too, a city close to the Yorkshire mines that closed at the same time that shipbuilding was turning to rust in the North East.

York Press:

The full cast in Sting's musical The Last Ship. Picture: Pamela Raith

"The best musicals are about communities," says Sting, whose musical recalls the desperate measures individuals and communities took to keep their livelihood, dignity and passion alive.

"I'd been writing songs about my town since the early Nineties," says Sting, who was steeped in the folk music of the North East. Such songwriting "doesn't take long to come back, like a salmon coming back to its spawning grounds," but he "didn't have the courage" to take forward his idea of turning such songs into a theatre show until he met a producer in New York.

The Last Ship now sails again under the direction of Northern Stage artistic director Lorne Campbell, and Sting is delighted with the re-launch. "Everything was meant to happen in the way it did. I learnt a great deal in New York and the play is different now; it's more political, which it has to be when we are where we are," he says.

"There's an authenticity to it that people will recognise; any northern town will recognise your esteem being taken from you. People will relate to that as a universal theme."

Now 66, Sting recalls how shipbuilding was not for him, drawn instead to a bass guitar. "At the time I wanted to get out of there, thinking 'I don't belong here'," he says. "I did everything to leave, but then later I felt I wanted to pay my debt to the place where literally at the end of my street was a ship being built."

Looking out from the City Varieties stage, Sting recalled past performances in Leeds: "I remember playing the Town Hall in the early days of The Police; I always like coming back," he says.

Ah yes, Sting, but will you ever grace a York stage? "I will play there one day," he says, ever so politely. 

The Last Ship, Leeds Grand Theatre, May 2 to 5; York Theatre Royal, June 25 to 30; Leeds box office, 0844 848 2700 or at leedsgrandtheatre.com; York, 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk