Arrive - September/October 2014

GIDEON’S TRAVELS

Not since the early ’80s, when the Police contentiously disbanded over power issues, has Sting worked in true collaboration. It’s been required, with Logan and the rest of the play’s creators, who spent months getting inside his songs, reworking the narrative, honing the work in his New York studio, in rehearsal, and in previews in Chicago, where I saw Logan and Mantello feverishly making notes during intermission, always critiquing and evolving the show. As Sting freely admits, he’s used to being the boss, and it’s been a revelatory process not to be.

Schenker says wryly, “I think he’s enjoyed being
told what to do for once.” And it’s not like Logan
has a history of holding back: When he met Stephen
Sondheim to adapt Sweeney Todd for the screen, the
first thing he told the composer was, “This score is your
As Sting says, “I’ve learned from him about kill-
ing your babies,” often songs or even entire charac-
ters he’s fought for. “For me, it’s both comforting
and slightly disconcerting to have people say it isn’t
working.” In the show, Gideon meets a rival for his
love interest, the girl he left behind. Sting wrote
the character, Arthur, as an older man, wise and
spry. Logan and Mantello told him, Sting says,
“The woman loving him isn’t convincing if he’s
not attractive.” Not attractive? “I wrote Arthur as
a character like myself—and not only was I being
thrown out” for a younger character, “but I had to
write a song for him.”
Of course Sting’s true avatar in the play is a
young man himself, the prodigal Gideon. Pushed to
recognize the chain of similarities between himself
and his protagonist, he widens his eyes, stunned
for a moment.

“Perhaps it was unconscious, writing myself into it. But look what I did, giving him the name Gideon— like Gordon!” the name he abandoned along with Wallsend. (The line in the play “cursed me with a wanker’s name from birth!” suggests it may have been slightly more than unconscious.)