Sting said he was inspired to write The Last Ship to give the community where he was born a voice.

He gave it an entire choir.

The rich, soaring, folk voices of The Last Ship filled Leeds Grand Theatre last night as the original musical sought to tell the story of a shipyard and its workers.

Of an industry on its knees and taking human casualties, of a community where you get out or get on with it.

It's not cheerful, but it's real. And there's nothing like Geordie humour to make even the darkest moments that much brighter.

My boyfriend, who came with me to last night's opening, is from Hartlepool and remembers the closing of a local shipyard when he was a kid.

And while I don't have any personal experience of watching a community losing something as big as a shipyard, of workers left with little hope, the anguish was palpable.

The music features big, booming, stomping songs that seem to make the ground shake - then in the next instant, softer, folksy ditties full of soul and emotion.

And it's been a while since I heard harmonies as rich, and deep, whether between two characters or 10.

The first half, full of fire and determination, packs in an awful lot - the threat of the dole queue, the end of an industry, the return of a stranger lost at sea.

The Last Ship cast
The Last Ship cast

You warm immediately to the characters (and the accents help).

Jackie (Joe McGann) and Peggy White (Emmerdale's Charlie Hardwick), the foreman of the yard and his devoted wife, are the very definition of salt-of-the-earth and you root for them immediately.

Frances McNamee, as landlady Meg Dawson, steals her opening scene with sass and style, along with a beautiful, powerful singing voice. While this show has a large female cast, Meg's character is the most fleshed out - we know her more than any other woman connected to the shipyard. It's a shame the stories of some of the other female characters were less explored.

Likewise with Richard Fleeshman's character, Gideon Fletcher. So much of the storyline - away from the shipyard under threat - came from his return and the ripples it caused.

But there were still questions to be answered at the end of the show, so much so that its finale was somewhat tarnished.

I have to give credit to Fleeshman - he has a voice like melted caramel, and an impressive range - this is far from his first rodeo and we're certainly a long way away from his early days in Corrie.

But - and I have to say it - his performance jarred whenever he swapped between speech (a confident Geordie accent) to song. His singing voice, while superb, was so distinctly different that it was an interval talking point. There wasn't a scrap of north east accent in it, which was made more obvious when the rest of the cast managed to sing with the Geordie twang.

The cast, in the rousing ensemble numbers, are a force to be reckoned with - but despite the build up, the second half didn't feel quite as powerful as the first.

Maybe it was the length of the show (around two and a half hours) - maybe the inevitability of what was going to happen to the workers so determined to fight in the first half. But the surge of emotion I'd felt at the interval had waned by the time the show ended.

Musically, it's gorgeous - Sting can certainly create magic. But perhaps that's not quite enough to make a debut a smash.