By the mid-eighties, Sting had sold tens of millions of records, with the Police and solo. In 1987, both his parents were dying, and he returned home; the shipyard was struggling, too. “I saw the shipyard and thought, That’s quite a metaphor.” His parents died that year, and the shipyard closed a while later. The converging losses led to Sting’s 1991 album, “The Soul Cages”—not a fan favorite, though it has “a constituency of the recently bereaved.” He also saw something theatrical in it: “The shipyard has an operatic scale.” In 2011, he dug in, writing stanzas for a foreman, a riveter, a welder, and others, and composing a score informed by “the local folk music, very Celtic”; sea chanteys; and classic musicals, which he’d listened to growing up with his mother, a Rodgers and Hammerstein fan. (“The daisies in the dell / will give out a different smell,” he sang, recalling Pore Jud.) The current “Ship” has a new book, some new songs, and Sting’s collaborator and pal Shaggy, the boombastic reggae star, who plays a mischievous ferryman.