Flying Over Sunset
Book by James Lapine
Music by Tom Kitt
Lyrics by Michael Korie
Direction by James Lapine
Lincoln Center Theatre at the Vivian Beaumont
December 31, 2021
Production website
💉💉 out of 5.

It was a perfect New Year’s Eve.  I was lucky and scored tickets in the first row right to the side of the stage next to the step down into the audience.  The seat was comfortable, plenty of leg room and NO chatty neighbors!  Heaven!  The musical, Flying Over Sunset was quite an adventure.  The brief program note bears repeating, 

In the 1950’s the drug LSD was legal, but generally it was only experimented with by a small number of people either under the radar or in a clinical setting.  Flying Over Sunset is a work of fiction inspired by the extraordinary lives of Aldous Huxley, Claire Boothe Luce, Cary Grant, and Gerald Heard, all of whom experimented with the drug.  We know that the famed author and philosopher Aldous Huxley’s first experience with LSD began when he stopped at a new Rexall drug store in Los Angeles on what was to be a quick errand.  He was with his wife Maria and an old friend Gerald Heard.  WE know that playwright Congresswoman and Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce first experienced the drug in the garden of her Ridgefield, Connecticut, estate with Gerald Heard serving as her guide.  We know that at his wife’s urging, the movie star Cary Grant went to her psychiatrist’s office to find out more about this miraculous drug she dept urging him to try.  Flying Over Sunset connects the dots.

Chicken and Biscuits
Written by Douglas Lyons
Directed by Zhailon Livingston
Circle in the Square
October 16, 2021
Production website
💉💉 out of 5.

I love a good silly comedy but I just didn’t love this play.  Ala a Tyler Perry movie, there is a funeral of the family patriarch and everyone is drawn home for the service.  This, of course, sets out an avalanche of family dysfunctions and dancing skeletons in the closet.  Sounds familiar doesn’t it?   It was all so forced and so predictable.  The acting was so big and so forced that they missed many moments that could have used some subtlety.  Michael Uhrie as the token white guy in the play was truly hilarours.  His timing was perfect and he could make the most out of the smallest of moments.  He was almost worth the price of admission. The rest of the cast seemed to depend on attitudes in place of character development and stereotypes at the cost of originality. I do have a problem with stage plays that would have made a better TV show.  I am not sure what Chicken and Biscuits had that demanded live theatre.