He happily admits to being a pretentious yogic high-flyer who wound people up with talk of his tantric sex life. Now he's back with his first album in nearly a decade and a musical on Broadway. What a pretentious wanker I am!" shouts Sting loudly. We are on the French Riviera, sitting at a quiet table on the balcony of the house - now a hotel - where F Scott Fitzgerald wrote Tender is the Night, and I have just reminded Sting of a remark he made in 1987. Then a 36-year-old superstar promoting a new album, Nothing Like the Sun, he declared: "I don't want to be a pop star all my life. I'd quite like to be a balding, rotund, Jungian analyst between 40 and 50..."

Early in May, a few hundred people received hush-hush invitations to the Signature Theater in Midtown. They arrived for a staged reading, a spartan workshop production assembled in under 29 hours of rehearsal as a preview for potential backers and other interested parties. On a crowded stage, with scripts in hand, cast members played out a story set in an English town whose shipbuilding industry was in its last throes. The plot intertwines a love triangle, reckonings between fathers and sons and a labor uprising (workers seizing a factory to build a last ship before the factory shuts down) with crosscurrents of economics and faith. The songs bridge show tunes and British folk traditions. The presentation received a standing ovation, something that doesn't always happen at staged readings...