My wife loves Sting.

In fact, she once told me early in our relationship that “if Sting ever shows up at my door, your shoes will be on the front stoop.”

I Love my wife. I also like Sting. So we have seen Sting in concert with The Police at Jones Beach, solo in Holmdel, NJ and many TV specials. We watched him as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in the 1984 movie Dune. We watched his cameo on Saturday Night Live where Rob Schneider sang out  “The Stingmeister,  Sting-a-ling-a ling, makin’ copies.”

Everyone in Billie’s extended Family knows that she loves Sting. So, a month before her birthday my daughter said, “I have the perfect present for you to give Billie: Sting is starring in The Last Ship at the Met Opera House next month.”

It seemed like a great idea. Orchestra seats were pricey, even direct from the venue and more  from all the resellers. I observed that the Met had a policy, like a lot of Broadway theatres, to radically discount unsold seats twenty-four hours before the performance.

Did I feel lucky? After all, this show didn’t do that well on its first Broadway run. In the end, I decided not to gamble with my wife’s birthday present, bit the bullet, and bought two orchestra seats with good sightlines.

Lessons from Musicals

I pursued my undergraduate degree in theatre because of a musical. I was a lost fifteen-year-old when a mentor cast me as Billy Bigelow in Carousel. I delved into this carousel barker, whose rough and tumble life was transformed by love and impending Fatherhood.  When my first child was born I sang her the soliloquy, “My little girl, pink and white as peaches and cream is she.”  Young Bigelow is driven to bad choices to be sure that his daughter “won’t be dragged up in slums with a lotta bums like me.”

From Carousel I learned I was good at understanding a character and could project that to an audience. I also liked the practice, learning, and the short term nature of the work. You work hard till the play is done, but when the curtain comes down and the applause fades, you move on. Good lessons for a life in consulting.

I worked hard to land the lead in the senior musical, The King and I. I listened to Yule Brenner on the original cast album even more than I listened to John Raitt on the Carousel recording. I went to the library. I read Anna Leonowens’s book and everything I could find about Siam. That work paid off when I got the role, but the real work was just beginning. I did a passable job for a teenager as Mongut, the King of Siam. When I went to my fiftieth high school reunion people kept referring to me as “The King,” an event Billie won’t let me forget. “Did you do anything else in high school?”

The King and I  has many lessons. It shows how a clash of different cultures can be overcome by openness. It shows change in the transition between generations. I’m not sure if Billie understood when we went to Thailand in 1990, why I was so interested in the Thai Abraham Lincoln, Chulalongkorn, who abolished slavery. I had a relationship with Chulalongkorn. “Is a puzzlement. What to tell a growing son.”

We saw the hanger with the royal dragon boats. Billie was fascinated. For me, it was fulfilled prophesy.

The Dying King Mongut asks his son, Crown Prince Chulalongkorn how he will celebrate the New Year as King

Prince Chulalongkorn: “First, I would proclaim for coming New Year… fireworks. Also boat races.”

King Mongkut: “Boat races? Why boat races with New Years’ celebration?”

Prince Chulalongkorn: “I like boat races.”

In my freshman year of college I played the boy in The Fantasticks. This is a simple fable musical of young love, separation, suffering, and the sweet redemption of lovers finding each other again after separation, a theme that I have lived in my life.

This redemption is unlikely to be seem on stage in the original version anytime soon. The suffering in the play is an abduction of the girl.  El Gallo sells this experience to the couple’s fathers to help the kids grow up and recognize their love. This transaction is sung by El Gallo in the “Rape Song,”  “Some prefer the word abduction, but the proper word is rape,” he says and then proceeds to sing his selection of offerings.

“You can have the rape romantic, you can have the rape polite, you can have the rape on horseback a truly charming sight.” Funny perhaps in the 1960s, less appropriate today.

Musicals are a strange art form.  As my son once said, “Just when the story gets really interesting, someone bursts forth in song.” Still they teach some lessons’

There is almost always a young -love-sadder-but-wiser love theme. Often there is a love conquering impossible barriers, like Brigadoon reappearing so Tommy and Fiona can be reunited, or Billy Bigelow whispering to Julie “Know that I loved you” from beyond the grave in Carousel.

There is often struggle and redemption. Andrew Lloyd Webber has made a career out of the redemption theme. Grizabella ascends the stairway to heaven in Cats, Rusty the broken down steam engine wins the race and Pearl in Starlight Express,  Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar proves that the way he lives his life, especially his relationship with Mary Magdalene and Judas, is a redemption that doesn’t depend upon resurrection.

Lessons from The Last Ship

We first watched Sting’s musical The Last Ship as a live TV broadcast a couple of years ago. Billie recently listened to a podcast where he talked about how important this musical is to him. It is set in Walls End, a village at the eastern end of Hadrian’s Wall on the north bank of the Tyne River in Newcastle, England. It is the shipbuilding community where one Gordon Sumner (Sting) grew up,

“There was always a big ship at the end of our street and I watched men, including my father, walk down the street to the shipyard every day.”

Sting, like Gideon in the play, left Wall’s End, wanting a different life, “Not this.” Gideon has unresolved issues with his father, who always expected him to follow in his bootsteps to the shipyard. Gideon pursues a life at sea, but  leaves behind his first love Meg, who now runs a pub in town.

I’ll stop short of giving you the entire plot. Suffice it to say that the nationalized shipyard is closed by a cartoonish Baroness (Margaret Thatcher?).  Before privatization, and all its presumed job loss and community devastation, the workers band together to finish the last ship and launch it.

There are lessons here:

• There is a dignity to work. Shipbuilding employs many crafts, but they are joined to launch the ship that goes to sea to carry people and cargo.
• Community grows up around work. It is more than a workplace, more than a corporation. It is a collection of people and their Relationships. It is about how they have each other’s backs, how they do extraordinary things when they have to, and how they define their lives and worth by the work they do.
• Families have conflict. Some of that conflict centers around the launch of the younger generation. “Not this.” But how they handle that transition can strengthen or destroy bonds and lead to strong relationships or regrets. “I must have loved you.”
• Sadder-but-wiser-love is sweet. Separation can build understanding and make forging a contract, the important work of a lasting relationship, smoother. (Yeah, this one was personal.)

It’s a good show. If you want to just be entertained, there is great music. There are also lessons.

And my shoes are still inside my closet. Yay!