Flying Over Sunset

The World Premiere Of Flying over sunset

Offering up a vibrant portrait of three influential icons of the 1950s, Flying Over Sunset is anything but a dry historical drama. Adding a dash of the unorthodox to the Broadway season, the all-new production wings its way to the Lincoln Center returns in the fall of 2020, and its central subject matter is lysergic acid diethylamide AKA LSD, the psychedelic drug often used as a muse by some of the world's most celebrated creatives.

Three of those acclaimed individuals take center stage, weaving a highly original story as their lives collide in a kaleidoscopic fashion. Prodigious American playwright and politician Clare Booth-Luce, debonair Hollywood leading man Cary Grant and visionary English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley are brought to the stage by a creative team including Tony Award-winning librettist and director James Lapine (Falsettos, Into The Woods), Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tom Kitt (Next To Normal) and Tony-nominated lyricist Michael Korrie (Grey Gardens).

What is Flying Over Sunset About?

Inspired by real events, the surreal fictional musical is set in the 1950s, roughly two decades after LSD was discovered by Swiss chemist Alfred Hofman and used to treat mental illnesses and expand consciousnesses. In the play's first half, it follows the separate interactions with the drug by Booth Luce, Grant and Huxley and the second half finds them at a crossroads where they use the hallucinogenic together, facing the mysteries and complexities of their extraordinary lives.