2020-03-09_The_New_Yorker

18 THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 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). At

Second 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 Schulman

SPRING PREVIEW

LSD Fantasy, a Sarah Silverman Musical

THE THEATRE