Review: Sting recruits The Florida Orchestra to recite his symphonicities [PHOTOS]

If you know your Sting lore, you’d know that “Englishman In New York” isn’t entirely based on the Police frontman’s ventures in the biggest city in America.

In the liner notes to Sting’s sophomore album …Nothing Like The Sun, it was said that the fan-favorite was a salute to his friend Quentin Crisp, a legendary, openly-gay storyteller who moved to the city around the same time as him. The two became close and Crisp would always tell stories about how hard it was to be gay in early-20th-century England. As it turns out, the line “I’m an alien, I’m a legal alien” paraphrases an actual quote from a conversation the two had the day the U.S. Department of Immigration granted him said status.

In the same talk, Crisp also pointed out that now that he was a legal alien, he could commit a crime and not get deported. His fellow Englishman was happy for him, of course, but was curious about what sort of crime he was looking to commit. “He said ‘oh, something glamorous, of course!’” Sting laughed.

It’s only been a few months since Tampa Bay has been graced with ol’ Gordon Sumner’s presence, at a heavily sold-out show at Raymond James Stadium with Billy Joel. And while we love to see the 72-year-old with his in-ear mic and battered bass, it would be no surprise if his two nights at St. Pete’s Mahaffey Theater with The Florida Orchestra—under the baton of Maestro Michael Francis—end up making Sting’s favorite gigs of 2024 list (in the way that a stop in the exact same setting must have in 2017). There were little to no backing vocals, he sat on a stool for the entire two-hour show, and he looked relaxed in fully in his element.

Sting has performed—and recorded—with orchestras as prestigious as the Royal Philharmonic, but there might be a reason why those sorts of shows are so rare these days. When he’s onstage with just his band (which was still present in St. Pete on both nights), Sting isn’t necessarily out of place, but you can suspect that there’s at least a little bit of discomfort and that a more intimate setting, where he can tell stories and be backed by his legendary catalog in a manner that he may have only imagined in years past.

Surely, it must have been time for a reward after a few years of touring and creating new material seemingly non-stop.

After a few quick Florida Orchestra-related introductions, Sting, rocking a black turtleneck—as any ex-English teacher should—plopped down onto his stool, picked up his flowery acoustic guitar, and started talking about how he wrote “Roxanne” while staying in cheap hotels with Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers.

“The reason it is cheap is because we have to share it with the ladies of the night,” Sting recalled. “As you can imagine, as an ex-school teacher, I had led a pretty sheltered life up to that point, so I’m somewhat intrigued by the commerce of the ladies taking their clients up and down the stairs.”

It quickly became very clear that Sting knew what he was doing when he first hit up an orchestra all those years ago. The Florida Orchestra gave the songs a fuller, new life. And not in the manner of washed-up, B-list singers and bands re-recording the oldies for a four-disc box set being sold on TV in the middle of the night.

Sure, Sting’s duet with Billy Joel on “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” on the other side of the Bay earlier this year was great, but this version sounded like what could have played in his head while originally demoing the song with The Police. Basically, if there were a Best of the Bay category for “Best Irregular Performance of a Police song,” the orchestrated version should win that with flying colors.

Following a rousing performance of “Fields of Gold,” Sting began to express his love for old Western films and country music artists, specifically Hank Williams Sr., Buck Owens, and of course, Johnny Cash. He expressed how much of an honor it was to hear the Man in Black cover his next track, 1996’s “I Hung My Head,” near the end of his life, and he even threw on a black cowboy hat for the first verse and chorus of the song, which he would tip a few times and dramatically pose with while the lights silhouetted him.

“I wonder why he covered it, but I think it was because it was about a shooting,” he hypothesized.

A few deep cuts later (“Why Should I Cry For You?,” “The End of the Game”) a brief intermission hit, and Sting shuffled back onstage with “Shape of My Heart” and “Fortress Around Your Heart,” which worked just as divinely with the Francis-directed orchestra as you’d think.

He took a few songs to plug his decade-old musical “The Last Ship,” based on his small hometown of Wallsend, England, which specialized in shipbuilding.

“The only time we ever saw a famous person come to my town was when they would launch a ship,” he remembered, only specifically recalling seeing the Queen Mother roll into town once.

During Sting’s three-song “Last Ship” set, the Orchestra and Francis sat back and enjoyed themselves until he introduced “What Could Have Been,” his “Arcane League of Legends” track with TFO concertmaster Jeffrey Multer on violin in place of the original recording’s Ray Chen.

An epic “King of Pain” featured the musicians slowing down and suddenly shutting up during the last “little black spot on the sun” bit, which expertly sounded as if you turned one of your vinyl records from 33 1/3 RPM to zero. “It’s the same old thing as yesterday,” Sting sang, as The Florida Orchestra performed easily one of the greatest, right-in-the-feels crescendoes of all time.

He neither confirmed nor denied whether “Every Breath You Take” was supposed to be the stalker song of the 20th century.

“I’m not gonna contradict any interpretation of my song. I think it’s in my box,” he joked, then connecting the hit to James Bond author Ian Fleming, whose house Sting was in when the idea for the song came about. “James Bond is our guy. He saves the day…he also kills people,” he added.

A long-awaited “Desert Rose” kicked off his encore, and before going into his finale of “Fragile,” Sting pulled out a guitar made special for him by Italian prisoners doing a life sentence. But it wasn’t so much the fact that prisoners were trying to make something more of themselves while serving time. The multi-colored axe (which he had to restring upon reception) was made from pieces of the wreckage of refugee boats that washed up on the shores of Lampedusa, an island between Italy and North Africa.

Talk about a tale that may not resonate as well in a stadium.