Growing up in the former shipbuilding town of Wallsend in Northern England, singer-songwriter Sting remembers being terrified by the enormous ships and the apocalyptic noise they would make at launches. "I was born within the shadow of the shipyard. Literally at the end of my street, most of the time was a mighty quarter-of-a-million ton tanker or battleship," said Sting in an October 2013 news conference in Chicago. "It was a huge, surreal, industrial landscape." But now a ship of a different sort has the potential to instill fear in Sting: his first foray as a musical theater composer and lyricist. The Broadway-bound musical "The Last Ship" - inspired by Sting's experiences in Wallsend - launches its world premiere in Chicago at the Bank of America Theatre. Previews start Tuesday, June 10, with an official opening slated for Wednesday, June 25...

Sometime around 2004, Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, better known as Sting, a rock star with 16 Grammys and more than 100 million records sold, found himself with a severe case of writer's block. It wasn't that he stopped touring (he didn't), making money (he still made plenty) or even recording (there were albums of other people's songs and a new symphonic treatment of his past material), but he found, to his chagrin, he could not write any new songs. This went on for some eight years. He was, in the words of writer John Logan, "at an impasse." The title of Sting's intensely personal, strikingly reflective 2003 autobiography, "Broken Music," had proven prophetic...