Theatre in Review: Flying Over Sunset (Lincoln Center Theater/Vivian Beaumont Theater)

	Tony Yazbeck, Harry Hadden-Paton, Carmen Cusack. Photo: Joan Marcus

Flying Over Sunset just might be the best anti-drug PSA ever. Show it to young people thinking about getting high and I'll bet they'll swear off the stuff for life. They won't be scared straight, mind you; they'll just wonder what the fuss is all about. Among the new musical's many assets are a daringly original premise, a stellar trio of leads, some lovely melodies, and a stunning production design that uncannily mirrors its characters' stream-of-consciousness moments. But an abundance of interesting ideas never coalesces into the hallucinatory, revelatory experience the show seems to promise. A musical exploring the intersection of three twentieth-century celebrities and LSD proves to be, of all things, sedate.

This much is true: Long before the screaming headlines and flood of exploitation films like Psych-Out and The Trip, and long, long before Nancy Reagan urged her fellow Americans to Just Say No, LSD was considered a respectable, if avant-garde, psychiatric drug, and some of the nicest people were willing to take a trip that didn't involve Cunard or Pan Am. They included visionary novelist Aldous Huxley, always vitally interested in spiritual matters; playwright/politician/socialite Clare Boothe Luce, afflicted with debilitating depressions despite her glittering achievements; and Cary Grant, who, apparently, tried the drug at the behest of his then wife, Betsy Drake. Flying Over Sunset imagines them all getting together for a mutual acid drop under the guidance of Gerald Heard, the Anglo-Irish novelist and devotee of Hinduism.

In James Lapine's book, each of these characters is suffering from an unresolved sorrow: Huxley struggles with the illness and eventual death of his wife, Maria, from cancer; Luce mourns her mother and daughter, killed in separate car accidents; and Grant is haunted by a childhood marked by abandonment and emotional abuse. (After his mother was committed to a mental institution, he was told by his bullying father that she was dead, a lie that wasn't exposed until years later.) What follows is an extended, drug-fueled tour of their wounded psyches, a mental excursion that ends pretty much where it began.

Perhaps borrowing the structure of the psychoanalytic extravaganza Lady in the Dark, music is generally used only to inform the characters' hallucinations, often in extended and highly surreal sequences. But these are often dramatically irrelevant or redundant. It is modestly amusing when Huxley, on his first trip, delivers a bel canto-style aria about a Botticelli painting (joined by a pair of figures from the canvas), but why follow up with another number, featuring him obsessing rhapsodically over the weave of Maria's skirt and Heard's trousers? (It's the first tipoff that other people's trips, seen from the outside, might not be all that interesting.) The score harps so much on Luce's grief issues -- with multiple appearances by the shades of her mother and daughter -- that "How?", her genuinely powerful Act II cri de coeur, is undermined. Other numbers, such as "Huxley Knows," which establishes the character's inability to grieve, take forever to get to the point.

Grant fares better with "Funny Money," in which he executes a vintage music hall routine with his younger self; excitingly choreographed by Michelle Dorrance, it also lays bare his bad case of imposter syndrome. The film star also features in a stunning Act II sequence in which, seemingly lost in a storm-tossed ocean, he once again encounters the boy he once was. Less successful is a second-act fantasy tango with Sophia Loren (soon to star with him in the film Houseboat), which hints at his emotional problems without saying anything incisive. (Among other things, his alleged homosexual romance with Randolph Scott is brought up only to dropped like a sack of hot potatoes.) And, for collectors of high camp moments, there's the sight of Grant running around in a narcotic haze, repeatedly singing, "I am a giant penis rocket ship!"

Time and again, arresting staging ideas, supported by superb design work, threaten to unleash something exciting. Beowulf Boritt's curved upstage wall breaks apart and pivots to reveal drugstores, psychiatrist's offices, verdant gardens, and beach houses; in one bizarrely compelling effect, Luce's mother appears out from under a set of undulating palm branches. The projections by 59 Productions send carpets of flowers spreading across the set, call up psychedelically colored palm fronds, and layer multiple Renaissance images on the walls. Bradley King's lighting ranges from noirish landscapes to handsomely colored sunsets. Toni-Leslie James' costumes are gorgeous period creations; not every designer is this good with the details of men's tailoring. Dan Moses Schreier's sound design succeeds both in terms of clarity and creativity, precisely distributing certain effects, such as surf and seagulls, around the auditorium. All these elements come together in arresting staging moments -- for example, Huxley and Maria, dancing on a bare stage, dwarfed by their own shadows, as the company circles them, their footsteps reverberating eerily. Indeed, the design does more to illustrate the psychedelic experience than anything in the script or score.

The leads, under Lapine's direction, do their level best with real-life characters who have been sanded down to one-dimensional figures. Luce was a spiky, complex woman -- a political conservative, Roman Catholic, and gifted playwright with a problematic marital history, a talent for social climbing, and a rapier wit that eliminated her enemies at twenty paces -- not really the pleasant, tactful hostess seen here. Still, Carmen Cusack uses her natural radiance and powerful vocals to flesh out her troubled soul. Tony Yazbeck is as dapper as, well, Cary Grant, and his impeccable dancing at times lifts the show out of its inertia. The musical has less to say about Huxley, but Harry Hadden-Paton is an affable presence, holding forth articulately on various topics. Robert Sella's Gerald Heard is sensitively rendered, although the script makes him -- a celibate homosexual, a decision made for spiritual reasons -- the butt of silly gay jokes: He moons over Grant's undraped chest, and, in a tasteless bit of staging, the two men slip and fall, Heard landing with his head in Grant's butt. Equally unedifying is the discussion of whether Heard should take offense when Luce calls him a "pansy."

Tom Kitt's music, especially the lilting "The Music Plays On" and the title number, is unfailingly seductive and Michael Korie's lyrics, when allowed to make a pertinent point, have a rare elegance. Consider Luce's mother, reporting from the great beyond that "Heaven's an eternal Thomas Cook tour/Wind, sand, sleet/rain, or shine, we can't feel the heat." Or the description of the moment when "twilight turns the sky/To indigo and violet/With fragrant nightshade in flower/Shadows of unease/Silhouette the trees/This is the melancholy hour." Lapine's natural wit can't be fully contained, either; a good example involves Huxley facing a skeptical interviewer who says, "Your prophecies of babies being conceived in test tubes; people waking up in the morning taking a daily pill to improve their mood," before collapsing into caustic laughter. That round goes to Huxley.

But for all its invention and abundant good taste, Flying Over Sunset is surprisingly bereft of ideas; it is a highly sensory experience that has little room for drama or character development. After more than two-and-a-half hours of chemically assisted navel-gazing, the insights gained by these seekers are...pretty much the insights they began with. All seemed to have gained a measure of acceptance, which is nice to hear. But, for the audience, what a long, strange trip it has been. --David Barbour