Music
Every Breath at Flatbush, Sting Settles In at Brooklyn Paramount
The former Police frontman stretches his November stand in a restored 1928 movie palace to eight nights
Eight nights. That is how long Sting now plans to spend at the corner of Flatbush and DeKalb this November, and it is two more than he promised in the spring.
On Monday his camp announced a pair of new dates at Brooklyn Paramount, Friday, November 20 and Saturday, November 21. They join six shows already on the books for November 11, 12, 14, 15, 17 and 18. The tour announcement, as carried by The Music Universe, bills the result as a record breaking residency at the venue. Sting's fan club got first crack at tickets on Tuesday at 10 a.m. The general sale follows on Friday, October 2, at the same hour.
The math tells its own story. When Brooklyn Vegan first reported the fall routing back in March, six Brooklyn nights already made it the longest stand on the fall schedule. Now it runs twice as long as the four nights he plays in Montreal and four times as long as the two night visits to Seattle, Nashville and Pittsburgh.
A Trio Built for a Room
The show is called Sting 3.0, and the name is the concept. There are three people on stage. Sting plays bass and sings. Dominic Miller, his longtime guitarist and collaborator, plays guitar. Chris Maas, whose touring résumé includes Mumford & Sons and Maggie Rogers, plays drums. Brooklyn Vegan described the lineup as a power trio in the mold of the Police, which is as close as anyone is going to get to the real thing on a Tuesday in November.
The format strips the catalog back. The tour's materials promise the hits and the deep cuts alike, reworked to fit three players. There is already a record of what that sounds like. A live album called Sting 3.0 Live is out now on digital, CD and vinyl. It holds ten songs, and one of them, "Be Still My Beating Heart," appears in a live version for the first time.
Brooklyn gets a legend at close range, eight times over.
The trio has been road testing this idea around the world. The North American leg opens October 5 in Vancouver and threads through Minneapolis, St. Louis, Nashville, Indianapolis, Montreal, Akron and Pittsburgh before a stop in Wallingford, Connecticut, on November 9. Two days later it lands in Brooklyn. After the eighth night, the band heads to Florida for two closing shows. Fiction Plane opens every one of the Brooklyn dates. The tour is presented by Cherrytree Music Company and Live Nation.
The Palace on the Corner
The room matters as much as the band. Brooklyn Paramount opened on November 4, 1928, a Paramount Pictures movie palace designed by the Chicago firm Rapp and Rapp. The Architect's Newspaper notes it was billed as the first movie theater in America built for sound. The original house had burgundy seats, a stage curtain embroidered with satin pheasants, and a Wurlitzer organ with more than 1,800 pipes. The lobby had chandeliers and fountains stocked with goldfish.
It did not stay a cinema. In the 1950s the Paramount became one of the city's early rock and roll rooms, home to Alan Freed's package shows, with Chuck Berry and Fats Domino on the bill and Buddy Holly on stage in September 1957. Then the music stopped. Long Island University turned the auditorium into a basketball court in 1962, and for decades the Blackbirds played under a ceiling built for talking pictures.
Live Nation took over and restored it with the design firm Arcadis. The doors reopened on March 27, 2024, with Damian and Stephen Marley playing the first night. Since then the old palace has settled into life as a concert hall, big enough to feel like an event and small enough that the back row can still read a face. For an artist of his stature, choosing it is a statement about scale. It is also a very New York way to spend a November. Downtown Brooklyn after dark, with a restored ceiling overhead.
The borough has a taste for this kind of resurrection. Up in the Bronx, another movie palace came back to music this season. Brooklyn Paramount got there first.
A Year Between Stages
The residency caps a year in which Sting has kept one foot in concert halls and the other in the theater. His musical The Last Ship, rooted in his childhood in the shipbuilding town of Wallsend in northeast England, has been rebuilt as a large scale production with a company of more than 50. He plays Jackie White, the shipyard foreman whose health fails just as his crew needs him most.
New York has already seen it in its new form. In June the production played the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, with Shaggy in the cast as the Ferryman, according to Playbill. This year it has also played Amsterdam, Paris and Brisbane, according to Sting's own site. This week it is in London, where it runs at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane through October 3. The show has a long history with this city. An earlier version played Broadway's Neil Simon Theatre in 2014.
So the calendar looks like this. A West End run ends in early October. Two days later he is in Vancouver with a bass and two bandmates. Five weeks after that he is back in New York, on a stage built for talking pictures and saved from a gym floor.
He will be 75 by then. He has 17 Grammy Awards, a catalog that runs from "Roxanne" to "Fields of Gold," and nothing left to prove to anyone. The choice to play small and stay long says something anyway. Brooklyn gets a legend at close range, eight times over, and the late trains home from DeKalb Avenue will likely carry a lot of people humming the same songs.