After a UK premiere and a Chicago theatre run, The Last Ship – or, as most people know it “the Sting musical” – has made it to Broadway. The show is in previews this week and officially opens on 26 October.
Sting, a musician most famous for his time with the Police, wrote the music and lyrics for the show — but judging from the reviews leaking out on message boards like Broadwayworld.com, it looks like the musical could be headed for some choppy waters. “I think dreary is an excellent word for it,” wrote one commenter.
Despite the risk of ridicule, it’s not unusual for recording artists to try to branch out into musical theater — some are asked to lend their star power to a production, while others do it to branch out and challenge themselves as artists. While we wait for the critics to issue their verdict on The Last Ship’s opening night, let’s take a look at some of the biggest pop stars to come to Broadway and see how they fared.
Elton John – The Lion King, Aida, Billy Elliot, etc
The Lion King, for which John wrote the music, recently became the highest-grossing Broadway show of all time, raking in $6.2bn since it opened in 1997. For perspective: the musical has grossed more than all the James Bond films combined. Oh, and it also won a ton of Tony awards.
John also wrote the music for critics’ darling Aida, based on Verdi’s opera of the same name, and the smash hit Billy Elliot, adapted from Lee Hall’s beloved film about a coalminer’s son who just wants to dance.
But not everything John touches turns to Broadway gold: his ill-fated musical Lestat, based on Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles, closed after a mere 39 performances.
Duncan Sheik – Spring Awakening
Duncan Sheik made a name for himself as a solo artist back in the 90s with his sleeper hit Barely Breathing. But in the aughts, he reinvented himself as an A-list Broadway composer with Spring Awakening, which by all accounts (OK, mine) remains the defining musical for the millennial generation.
Throughout the show’s three-year run, adolescent theatregoers would camp out for hours on Manhattan’s grimy sidewalks for the chance at a discounted student ticket and a stagedoor photo with the show’s youthful, attractive cast. Spring Awakening launched the careers of Jonathan Groff, Lea Michele (Glee) and John Gallagher Jr (The Newsroom), and took home eight Tony awards – including Best Musical.
It also looks like the West End musical American Psycho, for which Sheik wrote the music and lyrics, will be coming to Broadway sooner than expected following some Patrick Bateman-esque manoeuvring by high-profile producers.
Cyndi Lauper – Kinky Boots
Was there ever going to be a more perfect vehicle for Cyndi Lauper’s arrival on the Great White Way than Kinky Boots? The musical, based on a movie about a British factory owner’s unlikely alliance with a drag queen, would have been boisterous enough with the book by Harvey Fierstein, but it’s Lauper’s songs that really knocked it out of the park. Kinky Boots won six Tony awards, including best original score for Lauper.
Bono and the Edge – Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark
These U2 stars’ Broadway venture was about as well-received as their recent iTunes album giveaway … which is to say, terribly. They wrote the songs for the high-profile trainwreck Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which was plagued by every possible problem you could imagine: a director’s ousting, cast injuries, and an overrun budget, to name a few. And while the hazardous set design took most of the heat in the press, the music and lyrics didn’t exactly have the verve required to compete with stunts that were, quite literally, death-defying.
But even though Spider-Man won exactly zero major awards and lost somewhere in the neighborhood of $60m, it did play 1,066 performances, and it has this distinction to its name: it was the most expensive musical in Broadway history.
