Flying Over Sunset (Broadway) NYC Reviews and Tickets
About the Show
Production Covid-19 Safety ProtocolsMember Reviews (319)
See it if It's entertaining and you learn more about LSD and the characters. Well acted, sung and danced. Enjoyable.
Don't see it if The play needs a real story behind it. It's a slow reveal documentary without a real backbone to the story.
See it if You want to see a unique & un-traditional musical. Excellent cast, sining, dancing & staging. Really loved Cusack's 11oclock number!
Don't see it if You want to see a show with lots of conflict. There is very little & no traditional villain or problem. Read more
See it if You like old style musicals, meaning lots of beautiful songs, and dance, built around a solid story. However, none of that is at it appears.
Don't see it if You want the same old song and dance. This is a very unique storyline told in a glorious way that takes you on a journey. Go with it. Read more
See it if If you love great sets and good acting. Lsd trips with 3 Hollywood stars.
Don't see it if If you want a traditional linear musical this is not for you.
See it if you'd enjoy a non-rushed story, non-traditional musical w/ great voices and choreography, spectacular sets and projections and solid acting.
Don't see it if you expect to hum a lot of memorable tunes on leaving the theatre or are impatient to gain the "feel" of this story.
See it if extraordinary visuals and fabulous dance sequences are enough to sustain your attention.
Don't see it if you are expecting a plot that progresses rather than repeats the first act in the second. It could also use some cutting.
See it if pleasant score; rhythmic percussive dancing; good ensemble particularly Carmen Cusak as Luce; inventive sets, video backdrops
Don't see it if fails to provide compelling reason for these 3 to share LSD experience and doesn't tie together their tragic stories; too long/overstuffed Read more
See it if Three Hollywood stars exploded LSD together. Old style look.
Don't see it if Subject of LSD, but remember at this time it was use for medical purposes.
Critic Reviews (18)
"Though sometimes mesmerizing, “Flying Over Sunset,” the new musical about LSD that opened there on Monday, is mostly bewildering, and further proof that transcendence can’t be shared."
Read more
"The Lincoln Center production has real pleasures: Yazbeck shares a thrilling music-hall duet, choreographed by Michelle Dorrance, with his younger self (Atticus Ware), who is dressed as a girl; Cusack sings as beautifully as always, as does Laura Shoop as Huxley’s wife. And the staging is very handsome indeed: Beowulf Boritt’s expansive set, Toni-Leslie James’s costumes and Bradley King’s lighting are all first-class. But these elements can only distract so much from a show that would probably make more sense as a one-act in a smaller space. What a long, strange trip it is."
Read more
"The image does not set up a theme or a motif or illuminate some unseen truth. The show’s 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."
Read more
"the creatives of this delectable theatrical bonbon treat us to a tasteful trip on the mild side...The show’s trippy sensibility is strikingly displayed on Beowulf Boritt’s spare, highly stylized cycloramic set and under Bradley King’s luscious lighting, which turns the color blue into a juicy fruit so cool and sweet the eye can almost taste it. Mixing up the senses is very much a quality of this thoughtful and unusually literate musical, which book writer and director Lapine has apparently conceived as a head trip with brains."
Read more
"Overlong and occasionally (but only occasionally) a bit tedious, the last third of the show loses its way. There’s some Freudian demon-facing, a lot of long-delayed (and fairly pat) self-acceptance and, in the case of the short-shrifted Gerald, a bit of ascendant fighting spirit, but for all the talk of communal experience and shared enlightenment, Flying Over Sunset just can’t quite figure out what these characters ultimately mean to, or do for, one another."
Read more
"This offbeat premise — smartly realized only by Beowulf Boritt’s scenic designs and the projections by 59 Productions — has been turned into an entertainment about as scintillating as an Agriculture Department instructional video on crop irrigation. It’s as if Lincoln Center Theater and the accomplished creative team (with two Pulitzer Prizes among them) came to the creative juncture of delightful and tedious and took the wrong fork.
Long-winded and impossibly earnest, the world-premiere musical, which marked its official opening Monday night at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, features an unremarkable score by Tom Kitt and Michael Korie and a lumbering book by James Lapine, who also directs."
Read more
"Being the only sober person in a room full of drunks is never any fun. Neither, as it would happen, is being an audience member at a musical about rich people who are high on LSD.
At least its trippy cousin “Hair” has energetic songs and some cute hippies who jump around to them."
Read more
"Unfortunately, “Flying Over Sunset” is an artistic misfire – and a nearly three-hour slog to sit through. The book is devoid of conflict (relying instead of introspection and confession), expository (filling in details about the politics of the period), repetitive (with the second act more or less mirroring the first act), and indulgently weird...With the exception of the evocative title song (which is powerfully performed by Cusack), the ethereal score is weighed down by prosaic lyrics and a lack of melody."
Read more
Trailer
Watch This Next (3)
Two teenage missionaries are sent to Africa to spread the word of Jesus Christ. What could go wrong?
A modern-day reimagining of Shakespeare’s Hamlet centered around a queer, Black man.
New York premiere of a play shortlisted for the 2012 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.