ABC/Randy HolmesThere have been plenty of musicals based around an artist’s catalogue of hits, but Sting’s The Last Ship isn’t one of them. The musician, who’s currently starring in the touring production of the stage show during its Los Angeles run, tells the Billboard Pop Shop Podcast he had no interest in making what he calls “a jukebox musical.”

“Then you’d have to shoehorn the songs into some spurious plot that would be stupid,” he says. “And I had no desire to do that.”

He adds, “I wanted to do the most difficult thing in the theater, which is to create an original musical. That’s the hardest thing you can do, and anybody will tell you that.”

Even so, that hasn’t stopped people from suggesting he set a show to his own hits.

“Yeah, people have suggested it all the time, and presented me with really dumb plot ideas,” Sting laughs.

Sting calls The Last Ship, which is based on his childhood in a Northern England shipbuilding town, the “greatest adventure of my creative life.” The show plays L.A. through February 16, before hitting San Francisco; Washington, DC; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Detroit.

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