Broadway Musical Review—“Flying Over Sunset”

Flying Over Sunset

Music by Tom Kitt; lyrics by Michael Korie

Book by James Lapine

Directed by James Lapine; choreography by Michelle Dorrance

Closes January 16, 2022

Vivian Beaumont Theatre, 150 West 65th Street, NYC

lct.org

Tony Yazbeck, Harry Hadden-Paton and Carmen Cusack in Flying Over Sunset

That Flying Over Sunset, the new musical by James Lapine, Tom Kitt and Michael Korie, is closing ahead of schedule (it was supposed to run through February 6 but it’s now shuttering this Sunday, January 16) is a sad commentary on the current state of theater. Not only because of COVID, even if that has a lot to do with it; but because of the uncommercial nature of the show itself. At the New Year’s Eve performance I attended, it was the smallest crowd I’ve seen at the Vivian Beaumont Theater since John Guare’s equally uncommercial Four Baboons Adoring the Sun 30 years ago. 

Some theatergoers are obviously not returning yet, especially during the holidays with omicron running rampant, and the musical itself—about LSD trips taken by Cary Grant, Clare Boothe Luce and Aldous Huxley in the 1950s, with no big stars—is not as obviously appealing to audiences as Hamilton, Company, The Lion King, etc. But that’s too bad: Lincoln Center Theater can afford to subsidize ambitious shows by big hits like South Pacific or The King and I, but when audiences don’t come, it might make the powers that be skittish about bankrolling another experiment that might not pan out commercially.

Still, for all its flaws, Flying Over Sunset is the kind of intelligent, original show we need more of, with characters and a storyline that can’t be summed up in a single sentence. Aldous Huxley, Clare Boothe Luce and Cary Grant encompass a world in which the arts, media, politics and popular entertainment intersected far removed from today’s social-media cacophony. The show itself, as Lapine’s musicals with Stephen Sondheim did, avoids standard musical clichés, like Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods. They also followed a similar trajectory, their first acts a sort of conventional storytelling (George Seurat painting La Grande Jatte and fairytale characters acting out familiar stories) and the second acts exploding that (Seurat's great-grandson is introduced and Brothers Grimm narratives become grim realities. 

Sunset, too—as always with Lapine—is ingeniously mapped out. The first act introduces Clare Boothe Luce, U.S. ambassador/author/conservative married to Life magazine mogul Henry Luce; British writer/philosopher Aldous Huxley; and movie matinee idol Cary Grant, who announces his retirement from films. The three celebrities are each in a creative or personal funk and the LSD they take—Boothe Luce and Huxley through their good (and gay) friend Gerald, Grant through his wife’s analyst—provides an opening into another, perhaps fuller consciousness. 

After the trio meets and agrees to a shared trip, overseen by Gerald, the second act of Flying Over Sunset cleverly dramatizes their varied responses, but to increasingly diminished returns thanks to Kitt and Lorie’s songs, which don’t reach the ambitiously high bar of Lapine’s scenario. Although never tuneless, they are too often similar and saccharine; a happy exception is the lovely title sung.
 

On the plus side, Lapine has perfected his blocking (think of the characters moving into their correct places in the Seurat canvas in Sunday in the Park with George) with the sweeping movements of the cast, especially in the curtain-raiser, “The Music Plays On,” where Beowulf Buritt’s sleek but simple set design, Bradley King’s cannily evocative lighting, Toni-Leslie James’ spot-on costumes and Michelle Dorrance’s fresh and inventive choreography coalesce to create a truly mesmerizing opening.

Throughout the show, Dorrance’s choreography comprises thrilling but not bombastic movements that marry the musical’s “reality” and “acid trip” states, displaying a happy facility for never letting the show flag. The obvious instance is during Grant’s first LSD intake at the doctor’s office; he’s visited by his preteen self, Archie Leach, and proceeds to have a real rip-roaring tap-dance duet. Joel Yazbeck (Grant) and young Atticus Ware (Archie) tear it up, Yazbeck especially, and even though it’s show-offy, there’s so much exuberance in Dorrance’s moves and Yazbeck and Ware’s delight in performing it that the dance itself should go down in Broadway annals as a masterpiece of tap.

Yazbeck, Carmen Cusack (Boothe Luce) and Harry Hadden-Paton (Huxley) are all superb as the leads, singing and acting persuasively, but only Cusack gets the chance to really break loose vocally in the sentimental “final trip” moment when Clare meets both her deceased mother and daughter, culminating with Cusack meltingly singing “How?” Robert Sella holds his own as Gerald, but Lapine at times doesn’t know what to do with him: there’s an embarrassing “human centipede” moment when Gerald falls face first into Grant’s butt cheeks (don’t ask).

But if Flying Over Sunset doesn’t always live up to its dazzling moments, there’s much to admire, even enjoy, in a show that doesn’t want to be merely pleasant Broadway fodder.