Sting has for decades made a practice of closing his concerts with “Fragile.” The pacifist ballad comes from “… Nothing Like the Sun,” the 1987 album that cemented the schoolteacher-turned-professorial-rock-star’s reputation as an artist with a global focus, in instrumentation and in subject. But the song from that album that provides the climax to Kate Prince’s Sting-focused dance saga “Message in a Bottle” at the Kennedy Center is a more lyrically direct one: “They Dance Alone .
The two songs already named and the 21st century tracks “Inshallah” and “The Empty Chair” — the latter written in memory of James Foley, the war correspondent beheaded by ISIS in 2014 — have a close lyrical bearing on Prince’s story. Elsewhere, her efforts to connect her narrative to Sting’s declarations of love and howls of isolation is more tenuous.
In sum, the show, which premiered at London’s Sadler Wells Theatre in 2020, is a more persuasive re-contextualization of Sting’s music than, say,which repurposed Matthew Sweet’s eponymous 1991 breakup album as the soundtrack to a budding love affair between two lonely teenaged boys in early ’90s Nebraska.
While many of these songs are heard in their familiar recorded versions, new arrangements abound, and Sting scholars will delight in the way he has interwoven “Desert Rose” and “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You,” to cite one early example. Eight numbers feature new singing from “guest vocalists” Beverley Knight, Lynval Golding, Claudia Georgette, Shaneeka Simon and Christella Litras.
But of course the show belongs to Prince’s lithe and unencumbered dancers, whose relationship to gravity — anrelationship, it would appear — is nicely captured by the 1979 Police track “Walking on the Moon.”
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