“Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home!”
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review Lincoln Center Theater’s premiere production of Flying Over Sunset. Here’s an excerpt.
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I didn’t know what to make of LSD. It was illegal, of course, and Sgt. Joe Friday assured me on “Dragnet” that taking it was the first step down a short road to psychotic hippiedom. Yet the radio was simultaneously full of trippy hit singles like the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” and the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” that seductively begged to differ. Being the cautious type, I ended up steering clear of the stuff, but I wonder what I’d have done had I known that in 1958, a full decade before possession of LSD was criminalized in the U.S., Cary Grant took it every week under a psychiatrist’s care and thereafter swore by it, claiming that his hundred-odd trips effected a “beneficial cleansing” of his soul.
James Lapine, Stephen Sondheim’s longtime creative collaborator, took LSD frequently in his younger years, and now he has written the book of a new musical called “Flying Over Sunset” in which he portrays onstage the LSD-related experiences of Grant (played here by Tony Yazbeck), the novelist Aldous Huxley (Harry Hadden-Paton) and the playwright-politician Clare Boothe Luce (Carmen Cusack), who all took acid trips around the same time. The heavily fictionalized conceit of the show, whose score is by Tom Kitt and Michael Korie, is that the members of this peculiarly sorted trio got to know one another by chance and took flight together under the guidance of Gerald Heard (Robert Sella), a wealthy scholar of Eastern religion who doubled as an ardent advocate for hallucinogenic drug use. While Mr. Lapine and Lincoln Center Theater, which is producing “Flying Over Sunset,” have struck it lucky—microdosing of LSD for therapeutic purposes is now in the news—this deliriously strange show would have been irresistibly watchable under any circumstances….
Between the pandemic and my late wife’s final illness, my life has been changed utterly, in many ways almost beyond recognition. I can’t remember the last time I:
• Went to a classical concert or an operatic production
• Rode in a boat
• Bought a book in a brick-and-mortar bookstore
• Saw a movie in a theater
• Attended a rehearsal of anything
• Watched the sun set
• Felt at ease walking after dark in New York’s theater district
• Sat in a hot tub
• Visited an art gallery
• Heard jazz in a club
• Went to Washington, D.C., which I used to visit regularly to see shows and friends
• Played piano
• Took a vacation
• Read a weekly newsmagazine
• Shopped in a store for anything at all other than food or pharmaceutical supplies
“Psycho is one of his most interesting pictures because he had to make the picture very fast, with very primitive means. He had little money, and this picture tells very much about him. Not very good things. He is completely infantile, and I would like to know more—no, I don’t want to know—about his behaviour with, or, rather, against women. But this picture is very interesting.”
