From Flying Over Sunset, at the Vivian Beaumont. Photo: Joan Marcus

I spent the morning after seeing Flying Over Sunset the same way I assume everyone else did surfing Wikipedia. There was so much history, referenced so sloppily, during James Lapine, Tom Kitt, and Michael Kories ill-conceived musical about psychedelics that I needed a next-day huddle with my computer. Those hours I spent with my laptop were the best ones that the musical brought me. Footnotes! Cross-references! I believe that internet binge gave me the same high the creative team must once have felt the intoxication of learning about real people and diving into the details of their lives.

In interviews, the musicals book-writer and director James Lapine has spoken about finding the inspiration for Flying Over Sunset in a biography of Clare Boothe Luce, the mid-century playwright and politician who became a towering figure of American conservatism. Luce took LSD for psychiatric reasons, and she was linked to the consciousness pioneer Gerald Heard, himself a dear friend of the writer Aldous Huxley. This daisy-chain acquaintanceship interested Lapine. The real Cary Grants own interest in acid then offered him a fourth LSD-curious celeb running around California in the 50s, and as anyone knows, once four celebrities (possibly) meet, youve got to make a show about it. (You do not.)

Our first voyager, Huxley, played by Harry Hadden-Paton, has his initial drug experience in a Rexall Drug. (So far, so true: Huxleys book The Doors of Perception contains the account of this experiment with mescaline.) As his wife (Laura Shoop) and Heard (Robert Sella) try to tug him out of the magazine aisle, Huxley sing-talks about imagining the Biblical Judith as she emerges from a Botticelli painting. Hes tripping hard: The curving white walls of Beowulf Boritts set invert; projected images crawl all over them; a little video fish wriggles inside a spherical lamp. But for all this visual hullabaloo, were not meant to think about Judith beheading Holofernes. The image does not set up a theme or a motif or illuminate some unseen truth. The shows songs lush but dull music by Kitt, lyrics by Korie all show us acid trips, yet the grindingly inert and ineffectual Judith number makes you keen never to share one of these hallucinations again.

Huxleys wife quickly expires slowly tap-dancing chorus members remind you of Deaths steady tread and she haunts him by drifting in and out of his LSD experiences. For the rest of the show, Huxley will have one directive: to dance again with her. Like Huxley, Luce (the dazzling Carmen Cusack) is also in mourning. We see her sad about any number of things: her sexually loose mother, a contentious Senate hearing over her appointment as an ambassador, and her teenage daughters death in a car wreck. As with Huxley, the things that make the historic person fascinating are subsumed by the show into one basic therapy revelation Luces Senate stuff vanishes fast, but we spend a lot of time on the dead daughter, whose absolution she craves. At one point or another, characters will raise their divisions on issues of public morality or war, but theyre hushed by Gerald. No politics! he cries, which effectively cuts off anything that might stimulate conflict or conversation. Just as Huxleys wife dogs his steps, ghosts tailgate Luce. Again Lapine calls upon choreographer Michelle Dorrance to set the vibe. The gloomy dead tap-walk in a gloomy tap-circle. Step drag step drag.

Cary Grant may never have met the other three, but Lapine distorts reality to get him there. Even within the spaced-out logic of the show, its never plausible that the star would meet these other seekers and decide to get high with them on a beach. (Tripping in Malibu is the entirety of the deadly second act.) Certainly Tony Yazbecks Grant seems ill at ease, even apologetic, throughout. Though to be fair, he has the hardest job of the four: Cary Grant is a known quantity even in 2021, so theres the familiar accent and the stiff-spined, gliding grace to try to copy. Yazbeck makes a hash of the voice, and he displays a different, more percussive grace, but at least he has barrels of that: The moments when the show stops to let him tap-dance with a vision of his precociously talented child self (Atticus Ware) are by far its best. Its too bad that baby Cary has to then join the Baggage Parade (step drag step drag), and eventually, in a watery vision, get washed out to sea.

The key post-show discussion question in my small group was How did this get made? The Vivian Beaumont is a big house to sign over to a musical so dramaturgically inept, so lacking in connection, philosophy, or fire. I can understand if at first the Lincoln Center folks were persuaded by the teams collective resum: the performers are strong, Lapine wrote the book for Sunday in the Park With George, and Tom Kitt composed Next to Normal. But there were workshops! There were opportunities to see Yazbeck blush his way through a number in which Grant thinks he is a giant penis blasting off from earth like a spaceship, and to see how bland and puerile such a scene winds up being in execution.

The most you can say for the shows acid-trip stuff is that it sometimes shows a juvenile, snickering humor: After Carys phallic blastoff, we see Clares vision of the afterlife, which looks like a huge ferny mandala, a giant green yonic symbol with her dead mother sitting right at the center. Tee-hee! I can picture someone thinking. Clares slutty mother is in a purgatory that looks like a big vagina! Im not saying this was a wonderful moment: I would need to be extremely high myself to think this was hilarious stuff. But I can at least imagine a version of the show in which it was funny. Thats the thing, really our conscious imagination is more powerful than the subconscious. We learn early in the production that a trip, like a dream, is a private experience, full of the minds rich colors. Make something up, tell a story, you can keep us interested for hours. But other peoples drug experiencesand if you have stoner friends, you will recognize thisdie the moment you narrate them. Dream-colors fade into gray in the spotlight; all the projections in the world can not make them bright again.

Flying Over Sunset is at the Vivian Beaumont Theater through February 6.

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When Lincoln Center Comes Down From This Trip, Theyre Going to Feel Weird - Vulture