18 THENEWYORKER,MARCH9, 2020
ILLUSTRATION BY ALVA SKOG
“During my LSD sessions, I would
learn a great deal,” Cary Grant once
said. In the late fifties and early sixties,
when the drug was used as an exper-
imental medical aid, Grant regularly
took supervised acid trips at the Psy-
chiatric Institute of Beverly Hills. (He
once envisioned himself as a penis
launching from Earth like a rocket
ship.) “Flying Over Sunset,” a new
musical by James Lapine, Tom Kitt,
and Michael Korie, imagines a 1957
trip shared by Grant (Tony Yazbeck)
and two other luminaries known to
have dabbled in LSD—the ambassador
Clare Boothe Luce (Carmen Cusack)
and the author Aldous Huxley (Harry
Hadden-Paton). Lapine’s production,
for Lincoln Center Theatre, starts
previews on March 12, at the Vivian
Beaumont.
Somehow, the LSD musical isn’t the
one with the singing laundry machine.
That would be “Caroline, or Change,”
Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s
2004 tale of a black maid working for
a Jewish family in Louisiana during
the civil-rights era. An underappreci-
ated gem, it returns to Broadway via
London’s West End, directed by Mi-
chael Longhurst and starring Sharon D
Clarke. (Previews begin March 13, at
Studio 54.) “Sing Street,” a musical
based on the 2016 John Carney film,
about a teen-age Dublin boy who starts
a band in the new-wave nineteen-eight-
ies, moves uptown after a winter run
Off Broadway. Carney and Gary Clark
wrote the songs, with a book by Enda
Walsh and direction by Rebecca Taich-
man (March 26, Lyceum).
Also on Broadway, Neil Pepe directs
Laurence Fishburne, Sam Rockwell, and
Darren Criss in “American Buffalo,”
David Mamet’s popular play from 1975,
set at a junk shop (March 24, Circle in
the Square). Mary-Louise Parker and
David Morse return to roles they orig-
inated in 1997, in Paula Vogel’s “How
I Learned to Drive,” about a woman
reckoning with being sexually abused
by her uncle; Mark Brokaw directs the
Manhattan Theatre Club production
(March 27, Samuel J. Friedman). AtSecond Stage, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and
Jesse Williams star in Richard Green-
berg’s 2002 comedy “Take Me Out,”
directed by Scott Ellis, in which a pro
baseball player comes out as gay (April 2,
Hayes). In John Benjamin Hickey’s re-
vival of the 1968 Neil Simon comedy
“Plaza Suite,” Sarah Jessica Parker and
Matthew Broderick play three different
couples who stay in the same hotel room
(March 13, Hudson).
Off Broadway premières include
“The Visitor,” a musical version of
the 2007 film, in which an economics
professor (David Hyde Pierce) finds
two undocumented immigrants (Ari’el
Stachel and Alysha Deslorieux) liv-
ing in his old apartment (March 24,
Public). Claire Foy and Matt Smith,
both late of “The Crown,” reunite in
“Lungs,” Duncan Macmillan’s portrait
of a couple deciding whether to bring
a child into a world threatened by eco-
logical doom (March 25, BAM’s Harvey
Theatre). And Sarah Silverman turns
her comedic memoir, “The Bedwetter,”
into a musical, co-written by Joshua
Harmon (“Bad Jews”) and Fountains of
Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger (April 25,
Atlantic Theatre Company).
—Michael SchulmanSPRINGPREVIEW
LSD Fantasy, a Sarah Silverman Musical