Sting the Knife : A pop singer takes a big leap--to Broadway’s ‘3 Penny Opera’

“I feel like I’m going inside to view the body . . . you know, like in a wake,” Janis Margolin said, giggling nervously as she stood in line outside the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on 46th Street.

The Long Island receptionist had been looking forward for weeks to seeing rock singer Sting make his Broadway debut in a new production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s biting musical “3 Penny Opera,” but she--and her three friends--were now apprehensive.

“If the show is as bad as the reviewers said it was in Washington, I’m almost embarrassed to go inside. . . . It seems kinda ghoulish, if you know what I mean,” continued Margolin, 32, a fan ever since Sting’s days as leader of the rock trio, the Police.

Others in line for the second New York preview of the show also mentioned the reviews from Washington--where the show premiered Sept. 14 and did a shakedown four weeks at the historic National Theatre in preparation for its Broadway opening next Sunday.

Washington Post critic David Richards had called the production “small change,” adding, “The very qualities that made the piece such a sensation in 1928--its bristling humor, its accusatory anger, its sullen impudence--remain pretty much locked up inside this lumbering production.

“Its raison d’etre--at least in terms of box office--is rock star Sting . . . (who is) striking to behold . . . (but) his acting has little resonance and his voice is surprisingly thin.”

More sharply, Hap Erstein, writing in the Washington Times, declared the “ ‘3 Penny Opera’--at this point at least--to not be worth 2 cents.”

There were lots of glum faces in Washington the day those reviews came out--especially among some of Sting’s friends and associates who had flown in to join President and Mrs. Bush at the premiere.

But the alarm didn’t extend to Sting himself.

Sitting on the balcony of his suite at the Watergate Hotel shortly after noon, he seemed merely impatient to get back to the theater and to work.

“I haven’t read the papers, but I know what they said. I could have virtually written them myself,” he said, matter of factly. “The reason I am doing this is to learn, to challenge myself. Critical failure is no disgrace as far as I am concerned--as long as there is a noble attempt. Come see how we are doing in four weeks.”

Four weeks later in New York, things had changed. Scenes had been rearranged, an afterword had been added and body mikes given to Sting and other performers so that they could be heard more easily.

Some of the second-night audience may have been anxious as they entered the theater, but various members of Sting’s entourage were in good spirits at the Lunt-Fontanne. They had seen the first preview the night before and had been greatly cheered. Sting too had gained authority in the role.

The play’s producer, Jerome Hellman--the noted film producer whose credits include the Oscar-winning “Midnight Cowboy” and “Coming Home”--also looked far more comfortable, as he stood in the theater lobby, than he had a month before in Washington.

Yet Sting’s mood seemed unchanged. The singer-actor, 38, appeared as calm as if he were back in the lodge after a day of skiing (a favorite relaxation) as he lounged in his dressing room later that night.

“We’ve made progress, but we’re still not finished,” he said, echoing his attitude in Washington. He continued, with a cool, detached calm that conveys self-discipline and emotional control, “The reason I wanted to do this was to learn, to challenge myself. I knew it was a risk, but I’m not afraid of risks. To me, the only failure is in refusing to take risks.”

Gordon Matthew Sumner is just so good-looking that it seems to bother a lot of people. They find it hard to believe anyone who’s blessed with such marvelously sculptured cheekbones and seductive hazel eyes wouldn’t just be satisfied with riches and fame--something that he had plenty of with the Police.

After all, he is a critically admired, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter who is in excellent health, has a lovely companion (actress Trudie Styler), homes or condos in London, New York and Malibu, and four children (two from a first marriage and two with Styler).

* It’s understandable that he wants to be an actor, but why a “serious” actor? Sounds pretty pretentious to some.

* It’s not hard to see why he would want to leave the Police for a solo career, but why start working with such jazz musicians as ace saxophonist Branford Marsalis and writing songs about social injustice in South America? Sounds pretty vain to some.

* It’s kind of vogue-ish these days to get involved in social causes, such as the Amnesty International tours and the campaign to save the Brazilian rain forests. Sounds pretty trendy to some.

* Why tackle Brecht on Broadway? Sting as Mack the Knife? Sounds like an ego out of control to some.

That’s a lot of suspicion--and some people’s latent mistrust was only fueled a few years ago when Stewart Copeland, the founder and drummer of the Police, gave this assessment of his former Police-mate:

“He gives you what he wants to give. Everything about him (that) you can see is part of his art form, and he really gets up-tight if you try to get behind it.”

Yet that’s not the view shared by others who work or know Sting now.

Jeff Greenfield, an ABC-TV news analyst, has done two “Good Morning America” pieces on him--and he’s impressed.

“This is the age of engineered emotion, and it doesn’t just deal with pop personalities, but all kinds of public officials--including corporation heads giving money or art works to museums,” Greenfield said at a reception following the Washington premire.

“That breeds suspicion and some people who are so cynical they don’t trust any public figure, but my level of cynicism doesn’t go that far.

“I don’t just look at what a person does. I also look at how a person acts--a sort of personal litmus test. Does the person have a sense of humor about himself? Does he show a willingness to discuss issues rather than offer dogma? Is he relaxed with who he is? To me, Sting passes. I like him a lot and I admire him.”

Sting smiled a bit sheepishly later when he heard Greenfield’s remarks, but he said that he doesn’t flinch when words like arrogance and ego are attached to his name. He accepts that he is a big target.

“At some point, you even twist it around and think of it as sort of confirming,” he said in Washington. “Criticizing me these days is like hitting a bull elephant with a shotgun. You don’t get any medals for that. But the fact that you are a big target means you are doing something that is getting through to a lot of people.”

“Macheath, that notorious king of the London underground, may be quick and lethal with a knife, but the Broadway-bound production of ‘3 Penny Opera’ that chronicles his wayward ways is slow and turgid stuff.”

Ian Copeland, who books Sting’s concerts, was reading the Washington Post review to Kim Turner, who (with Copeland’s brother, Miles) manages Sting’s pop career. They were sitting in the darkened bar of the Watergate Hotel the morning after the premiere at the National Theatre and both were wincing.

Copeland and Turner were surprised last year when Sting first told them he was going to do a Broadway play--just as they were surprised five years ago when he announced he was leaving what was, at the time, the most popular rock band to emerge since the punk uprising of the late ‘70s.

“I remember getting a phone call from Sting and he said he was going to put a jazz band together,” said Turner, an Englishman who was in a heavy-metal band in England while still in his teens. “My immediate thought was: ‘Are you kidding?’ We had just come out of this mega rock ‘n’ roll experience with the Police and he was talking about a jazz band.

“I remember putting together a proposal on how much money we could make if we just did one more record and one more tour with the Police, but he wouldn’t even listen to it. He said, ‘No, it’s over. I don’t want to even see it. Don’t bring it up again.’ And I was talking $40 million!”

For Copeland, (who, like Turner, also represented the Police), the big change when Sting went solo wasn’t just in musical direction, but in the performer’s attitude.

He had known Sting from the earliest days of the Police--and was familiar with his background. The son of a milkman from economically troubled Newcastle, England, Sting lived literally in the shadow of the shipyards.

As a youngster, he watched workmen come by every morning--hundreds of them--and then return home in the evening, and he feared he would become one of them. He saw education as a way out. He became an avid reader (it’s still a passion) and he applied himself in school.

Sting went to college, where he earned a teaching degree and taught English briefly at a convent school, but he moved to London in the mid-’70s to pursue a music career. Married with a child, Sting picked up some side money as a model while he played in jazz groups. He was spotted by Stewart Copeland (brother of Miles and Ian) and was asked to join the Police, which later added guitarist Andy Summers.

The Police, whose early trademark was uniformly bleached-blond hair, enjoyed phenomenal success, but relations within the band were always tense. One reason was that it started off as Stewart’s band, but Sting--as the lead singer, writer and sex symbol--gradually became the center of attention.

In 1984, after composing and singing such Top 10 hits as “Every Breath You Take” (that year’s Grammy winner for best song), Sting called it quits and started a solo career that has brought him even more critical respect. His second studio album, 1987’s “. . . Nothing Like the Sun,” is a carefully designed and purposeful work whose best moments recall the joyful musicality and sophisticated grace of Paul Simon’s triumphant “Graceland.”

Both Ian Copeland and Kim Turner had been closer to Stewart Copeland than to Sting, and they were surprised when he asked them to keep working with him.

“Sting took on a whole new personality,” Ian said. “Up until then, I could see what Stewart was saying in that quote (about Sting’s keeping up a front). As much as I had been on tour with him, I couldn’t get anywhere near him. There was this . . . aloofness, I guess is the word for it--a shield up all the time.

“But suddenly he became this different person. He went out of his way to make you feel appreciated . . . not just me, but the record company, sending flowers to the secretaries. And it was genuine.”

Another change at the time of the Police was that Sting and his first wife broke up. He started seeing Styler. There was a lot of change.

Ian Copeland thinks she helped bring him out of his shell. “She is just a wild and crazy, totally uninhibited person . . . really warm and very real. I think she helped to tear down a lot of his shields.”

On the day of the bad reviews in Washington, Jerome Hellman, who is making his first move to Broadway with “3 Penny Opera,” sat in his own Watergate Hotel suite and spoke about risks.

“I don’t believe there is anything in this business (of film and the theater) that is risk free,” he said. “If people could do things that were risk free, they would. If you don’t take risks, you aren’t going to create many opportunities.”

But he admits most of his film projects were considered long shots by Hollywood studios. And going to Broadway with Sting and “3 Penny Opera” will strike many as a big gamble.

Hellman brought in Tony Award-winning director John Dexter (whose Broadway credits include “M. Butterfly,” “The Royal Hunt of the Sun” and “Equus”) and a strong supporting cast that includes Broadway veterans Georgia Brown (who created the role of Nancy in “Oliver!” and won a Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle Award for “Roza”), Maureen McGovern (“The Pirates of Penzance” and “Nine”) and Alvin Epstein.

Sting has experience as an actor. He has gotten generally good reviews in appearances in nearly a dozen films (such varied projects as “Quadrophenia,” the widely admired tale of the Mod rock era in England; “Stormy Monday,” a film noir set in contemporary England, and “The Bride,” a poorly received Frankenstein spin-off). But nothing has established him as even close to being a bankable star.

Hellman lives near Sting in Malibu and has spent considerable time with the singer socially. The idea for “3 Penny Opera” came from Hellman’s wife, photographer Nancy Ellison, who, while listening to a Sting record, commented that he would make an excellent Macheath.

The producer was intrigued by the idea and began working on getting the Broadway rights, eventually working with the estates of Brecht and Weill to get a new translation by Village Voice drama critic Michael Feingold.

“One of the things that drew me to Sting was that he was an absolute contradiction of those preconceptions I had of a rock star,” Hellman said. “I know the risk in an exchange like this is that it sounds like malarkey, but he is a serious and thoughtful man . . . a very sensitive and creative man.

“He’s someone I feel I have a lot in common with. He started out on the low end of the socioeconomic ladder and bootstrapped himself up and determined to make something of himself and educating himself and refining his interests and his talents.”

Setting aside acting comparisons ( way aside), there is something about the rakish mustache that Sting has grown for “3 Penny Opera” that--along with his classic looks, tasteful English accent and disarming charm--makes him reminiscent of a young Laurence Oliver.

The Washington Post made the comparison in an article that ran the day of the National Theatre premiere, and some older theater fans--seeing Sting for the first time--mentioned it at intermission at the Lunt-Fontanne.

“I hope the comparison will not just be facial ,” Sting had told the Post reporter when the similarity was mentioned--and the self-deprecating humor is typical of him.

However controlled he appears, Sting is especially engaging during interviews. Like fellow Englishmen Mick Jagger and David Bowie, he is very self-confident and mentally quick--adroit at steering the conversation away from areas that displease him. Yet he reflects little of their manipulative qualities. He doesn’t seem to work at projecting an image.

On the day after the Washington premiere, Sting sat on the hotel balcony, staring out at the Potomac River. He was trying to put into words what has become, over the years, a natural way of making decisions for him.

When you have two choices and one seems logical and safe, he said, you should take the opposite one.

That’s the rule he applied the day he left the Police.

“I just knew I didn’t want to fall into that trap of being predictable,” he said, recalling that surprise 1984 decision. “I think it’s a link to the creative process. For me, the creative process is where you take other choices or you open yourself to things that aren’t logical because if you limit yourself to logic, the right thing, you never can be creative.”

About personality changes after the Police, he added: “I don’t think the Police was a particularly pleasant little operation. Things were very tense and that must have affected the way I behaved. I suppose being on my own has helped open me up, but maybe I’ve also just matured. That may have made me less abrasive, easier to get along with.”

One complaint about Sting offered by someone who has worked with him over the years (and who asked not to be identified) is Sting’s obsessiveness to his work, not an uncommon complaint leveled at pop stars. The longtime observer pointed out Sting didn’t even attend his own mother’s funeral because he was working on “. . . Nothing Like the Sun.”

Sting doesn’t flinch when the obsessiveness or funeral matters are raised.

“I feel a lot of musicians, probably because they are rewarded so readily, through commercial success or whatever, tend to sit back and say, ‘I’ll just keep writing songs with four chords and some rhyming couplets and that’s all I have to do.’ I know a lot of people do that and I despise the idea. I want to get better. You have to justify your life somehow and work is a way of doing it. I think work is very important in making someone feel fulfilled.”

But Sting denied that he skipped his mother’s funeral in 1987 just to finish an album.

“I don’t know. . . ,” he said, trying to explain such a personal, delicate decision. He seemed uncertain how deeply to go into his feelings. “My mother died during the recording of the (last) album and I just decided to stay and work. . . .”

He paused briefly, then continued. “I think grief is a very private matter, not a public show. Funerals are for the public and I didn’t feel I wanted to do that. I wanted to work through it and I am glad I did.

“My family understood that. Besides, I think my presence would have attracted the wrong kind of attention, sort of mawkish curiosity . . . press and tabloids. As it was, it was a quiet ceremony.”

Sting paused and again stared at the river below.

Then, he looked up and as if trying to recall the conversation before his mother’s funeral was mentioned.

“We were talking about work, right?”

Sting doesn’t have a single manager, a la Elvis Presley or so many pop stars. He uses different people for different roles. He turns to Miles Copeland to oversee his pop career, but relies on Keith Addis to advise him on acting roles.

“I prefer it that way because I want more than one source of information,” he said. “I probably pay more (money) because of it, but I think it is very dangerous for an artist to be tied up to one manager.”

Even with the advisers, however, he clearly makes the final decisions.

He admitted that some of the film projects were disappointments. “A couple of films were certainly not very good, but every actor has made bad movies,” he said, without being specific.

The decision to tackle “3 Penny Opera,” too, was all his.

“Some friends have asked why I didn’t start with a safer play . . . something by Andrew Lloyd Webber or someone,” he said. “But that wouldn’t have been as interesting. This is a play I have known for a long time, since I was a student. I’ve always liked the music and I think it is an interesting social message that applies in Washington today.

“For me, the message of the play is that when people are disenfranchised politically, socially and economically, then you can’t expect them to obey the rules. Why should they work in a fast-food restaurant when they can make $5,000 a day selling drugs? It’s a question of morals versus the rational mind.

“The ultimate irony last night for me was the President was there watching it. Brecht must be chuckling in Marxist heaven, if there is such a thing.”

The audience response at the Lunt-Fontanne, where the show had generated a strong $5 million advance sale, was better than at the premiere in Washington. But there were still danger signs. Some play-goers grumbled at the first intermission that he was too “nice” as the nasty Macheath. Others found the pace still too slow. But there was still some time to fine-tune before the official opening night.

Sting has been involved in “3 Penny Opera” now since August, a long time to be rooted for a man who is a self-confessed nomad.

“I’m still enjoying the process, the way the play keeps changing,” he said, sitting behind the make-up table, his feet propped against a nearby piano. (Sting, who plays bass on his own albums, says he tries to find an hour or two a day to play the piano. “I have no aptitude for it at all, but I have this need to drag myself through Mozart and Beethoven. It’s humbling and inspiring at the same time.”)

There will be a cast album from A&M; Records, but Sting--who still thinks of himself primarily as a musician--has no target date for his own next album.

“I don’t want to make an album (of my own) until I have something to say,” he said. “I feel I need some new ideas. If I wrote an album of songs now, they would be about social issues, the environment, because that has been so much a part of my life for the past year.

“And as much as I am committed to those issues, I don’t want that concern to obliterate my sense of metaphor. If you end up just saying save the whales or save the lemmings, that’s not art. It’s propaganda and I don’t want to do that.

“One of the exciting things about this project is I can’t predict what the fall-out is--in terms of my career and my personal life. One of the things that is starting to interest me is directing. . . .”

He stopped and smiled. “Oh, I can hear it now. ‘He’s just in his first play and he wants to direct. ‘ “Maybe you’d better leave that out.”