Review: Flying Over Sunset

James Lapine’s name has come up frequently as Stephen Sondheim’s collaborator, writing the book and directing Tony Award winners Passion and Into the Woods, and earning a Pulitzer Prize for Sunday in the Park with George (which inspired Lapine’s recent book, Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park with George). With his cred as a director (for those, as well as Falsettos and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) and the talents of composer Tom Kitt (Next to Normal) and lyricist Michael Korie (Grey Gardens), you’d think that Flying Over Sunset, now running at Lincoln Center Theater, would be a smash. You’d be wrong. Despite a few highlights, it’s strictly “meh.”  

Lapine uses the fact that Aldous Huxley, Clare Booth Luce, and Cary Grant all took LSD in Hollywood in the ‘50s and creates the conceit that they shared an acid trip together. Lapine apparently drew on his own psychedelic days in the ‘70s, as well as the historical record, to conjure what the experience would have been like for such celebrities. The first act is a promising series of vignettes – Huxley tripping in a Rexall store, Grant in a psychiatrist’s office, and Luce in her Connecticut estate – which concludes with the lovely title song.

Harry Hadden-Paton (an admirable Professor Higgins in LCT’s My Fair Lady) bears a passing resemblance to Huxley, as does Carmen Cusack (who truly shone in Bright Star) as Luce. Tony Yazbeck, who has had many starring Broadway roles, never conveys Grants suaveness, but does redeem himself in the middle scene, giving a tour de force performance in which Grant, who was a dancer in his youth, tap dances with his teenage self.

That attention to historical detail is impressive – we learn of Huxley’s Doors of Perception, Luce’s feminist ambition, and Grant’s ambivalence about fame – but the play is overly schematic.  In the second act the three convene at Luce’s Malibu home, and with another real character, Gerard Heard (played by Robert Sella) as their emissary, they embark on the fictitious acid trip. Fueled by the drug, the experience brings up multiple mother issues and personal problems from their individual pasts, but never coheres into anything dramatic.

This despite the considerable technical talents of the set designer Beowulf Boritt, the lighting designer Bradley King, the sound designer Dan Moses Schreier, and the projections of 59 Productions. Cusack’s lovely voice is wasted in a sluggish 11th hour solo, and Hadden-Paton, Yazbeck, and Sella are mired in an endless scene of near drowning. If Lapine hoped for enlightenment, I’m afraid we end up saying, who cares?  His production never soars, let alone flies over sunset.