"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 production is a head-scratcher from the get-go as the ensemble parades single file, doing loop-de-loops around the stage. Footsteps are loudly amplified, presumably to suggest the heightened sensory impact of LSD, but who knows. What’s clear is that the actors go in circles and so does the show. The second half restates what’s already been said in the first act, but with splashier visual effects. Songs drift in and out, etching vaporous impressions while they’re at it. The pretty title song emerges as the most vivid."
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

"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

"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

"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