Talk about pressure! Tony Yazbeck’s feeling it. It’s not easy playing Cary Grant, the man he calls “the greatest movie star of all time.”
Especially when Grant’s tap-dancing while tripping on LSD.
That’s what you’ll see in “Flying Over Sunset.” Inspired by the real-life, acid-dropping journeys of Grant, Aldous Huxley and Clare Boothe Luce in the 1950s, James Lapine fashioned a musical fantasy, now in previews at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, where it opens April 16.
Those hoping for a Grant look-alike won’t find one in Yazbeck, Lapine warns. “We weren’t going to put a dimple in his chin,” the playwright-director says. “But I think people are going to be blown away by Tony because he’s got it all. He can sing, he can dance, he can act, and he’s also handsome and dashing.”
Those very qualities helped Yazbeck channel Gene Kelly’s carefree sailor onstage in 2015’s “On the Town.” But Grant’s charisma, the 40-year-old says, was off the charts.
“Cary didn’t have to do anything,” Yazbeck tells The Post during a break in rehearsals. “He’d just sit there with his legs crossed, looking left, and you thought, ‘I gotta talk to this guy!’ ”
As Yazbeck discovered, the man born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England, had a hellish childhood. “His father was abusive and his mother disappeared when he was 10,” Yazbeck says. “His father had put her in an asylum.” But the boy was a natural acrobat, and his father soon had him performing in vaudeville.
“I believe he found joy in it, but there wasn’t much of a home life,” says Yazbeck, who soon realized he had more in common with Grant than he’d have guessed: a “chaotic” childhood of his own, with an abusive stepfather, disrupted schooling and “zero money.”
Yazbeck escaped through dance. Growing up in Pennsylvania, he started lessons at age 4, after his parents found him glued to a Fred Astaire film. At 11, he made his debut as a tap-dancing newsboy in “Gypsy,” his showbiz-loving mom driving him back and forth between Bethlehem and Broadway.
Years of therapy, marriage and the birth of a son three years ago helped him heal, Yazbeck says.
But Grant, who died 20 years after becoming a first-time and doting father at 62, found salvation in LSD. Encouraged by his third wife, Betsy Drake, the actor went to a psychiatrist’s office and embarked on the first of what would be many trips. He was pretty open about them, too. “He famously wrote in the Ladies Home Journal how he became a rocket ship in the shape of a penis,” Yazbeck says. “Which was crazy, but he must have been [feeling] so free.”
That freedom may have helped Grant, who died in 1986, respond to rumors about his relationships with other men, including his on-and-off roommate, actor Randolph Scott.
“He’d laugh at the press for even asking him about it,” Yazbeck says, “because after he tripped so many times, he knew that [sexuality] was never a big deal.”
Not that Yazbeck, whose glossy, side-parted hair looks straight out of the ’50s, has experimented with LSD himself. “My little sister, who’s this incredible, hippie Brooklyn poet, said, ‘Maybe you should try it,’ ” he says. “But I’m such a straight arrow when it comes to drugs. I don’t even love Advil!”
So far, he says, the biggest trip he’s taking is the one he’s on right now — starring in a show at Lincoln Center, yards away from a place that rejected him.
“I auditioned for Juilliard three times, and it was always no,” says Yazbeck, who left the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in his third year, too broke to pay the tuition. “And now I’m playing Cary Grant right across the street.”
Ref;nypost.com