Client
Karl Sydow Productions
Location
Theater Carre, Amsterdam
La Seine Musicale, Paris
Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane
The Metropolitan Opera, New York City
Collaborators
Short Street Productions
Sector
Theatre & Live Performance
Services Provided:
Story
Filmmaking & Animation
Design
Video & Animation Design
Lighting Design
Production Design & Set Design (live/theatrical)
Immersive Media Design
Services Provided:
Technology
Immersive Media & Projection Mapping
Delivery
Environment Build
Technical Direction & Production Management
Direction
Journey partnered with Sting to reimagine The Last Ship, his acclaimed musical inspired by his childhood in a shipbuilding town Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England. This renewed production brings the story back to stages across Europe, Australia and the US – with Sting performing as Jackie White throughout the full run.
For this new chapter, the full creative direction and design were brought in-house at Journey. Led by the show’s Director Leo Warner, we delivered the production’s entire visual world: stage design, set design, video, animation and illusion design. This end-to-end approach allowed us to create the show from thought to thing, building a single, cohesive environment where the physical and digital operate as one.
The Last Ship tour will show at:
• Theater Carré, Amsterdam (January)
• La Seine Musicale, Paris (February)
• Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane (May)
• The Metropolitan Opera, New York City (June)
Working across all design disciplines, we developed a large-scale ‘trompe l’oeil’ environment in which the physical set dissolves into the digital world. What begins as a tangible structure extends impossibly into virtual space – forming an illusion that fills the theatre and underpins the emotional power of the story.
It is the kind of future-facing stagecraft Journey is known for: IP-driven world-building, where narrative, physical design and digital media are conceived as one system.
Journey has collaborated with Sting for many years – from previous iterations of The Last Ship to residencies and world tours. Being invited back for this new production reflects the trust, continuity and shared creative language built over that time.
“The set is an event. People go away, blown away, as I am. […] This does really reproduce that surreal vision I had as a kid.”
– Sting
Each stop brings the world we’ve built to a new audience and a new architectural context – demonstrating Journey’s ability to deliver complex productions internationally across multiple venues.
This project reflects the way we work best: bringing physical and digital disciplines together to build a single world for the stage. Our team spans direction, set design, video, animation and illusion design, allowing us to shape productions as one continuous system rather than separate components.
Our long-standing relationship with Sting and the wider creative team speaks to the trust and continuity that sit at the heart of our work. The result is a production that is both technically ambitious and rooted in a shared creative language developed over many years.