Flying Over Sunset on Broadway

1950s Hollywood. You are at a beautiful beach house overlooking the Pacific with Cary Grant, Clare Boothe Luce and Aldous Huxley… and they are on an acid trip. Together.

That is the bold premise of FLYING OVER SUNSET, a new musical written and directed by Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award® winner James Lapine (Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Falsettos). Join three extraordinary people as they take an exhilarating journey into the most colorful corners of the human psyche – delving into their private desires, hopes and secrets. Carmen Cusack (Bright Star), Harry Hadden-Paton (My Fair Lady) and Tony Yazbeck (On the Town) lead the cast in this brilliantly imagined story of revelation and connection.

What do movie star Carey Grant, author Aldous Huxley, and diplomat-cum-playwright Clare Boothe Luce have in common? In their heyday, each of them experimented with the drug LSD. Yes, you read that correctly. The new musical Flying Over Sunset is a fictional imagining of the three public figures meeting in Malibu in the 1950s and sharing a hallucinogenic experience together. Flying Over Sunset tickets are available now. Get Flying Over Sunset Broadway tickets on TodayTix.

Written and directed by James Lapine, the Flying Over Sunset musical features music by Tom Kitt and lyrics by Michael Korie. The first act follows the historical characters’ first time using the drug, and act two brings the trio together to drop acid — a trip that leads to introspective searching and the discovery of deep-seated truths for the mid-life figures. This LSD-induced journey is marked by percussive tap dancing, choreographed by Michelle Dorrance, who is making her theatrical debut with this show. Flying Over Sunset in New York is certain to provide a memorable trip.

What to Watch For

• Flying Over Sunset is the first musical by James Lapine in 10 years. Lapine has written the book for several musicals, including Into the Woods and Sunday in the Park With George.
• The musical was inspired by a 2010 Vanity Fair article that exposed the use of LSD among elites.
• LSD, or Lysergic acid diethylamide, was legal in the 1950s and prescribed by psychiatrists.
• In the 1950s, Cary Grant was an A-list Hollywood star with credits including Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief and North By Northwest, among others. Clare Boothe Luce had recently served as U.S. ambassador to Italy, and Aldous Huxley had moved from England to Los Angeles to pursue a career in screenwriting.