Cary Grant delivers a robust, carnal performance as the flyboys' boss, and Jean Arthur is skittishly charming as an entertainer waiting for a boat out of town; Grant emits an electric charge when he starts to take her seriously.
It's theatrical music, ceremoniously staged in Kronos' moving, carnal performance, as the quartet shouts, bows water glasses and hits gongs to convey Crumb's "voyage of the soul".
But it is entirely consistent in other respects with the Californian artist's performances: crude, carnal, embarrassing, ludicrous, sometimes painful, sometimes shocking to watch.
His performance as a carnal, morally dubious hitchhiker in "Thelma & Louise" instantly made him both a star and an erotic object.
He has had solo hits, and he's given creditable acting performances in films including Carnal Knowledge and Bad Timing.
Coming To Power included Yoko Ono's 1966 trifecta of contraception methods, Object In Three Parts - Revolution, as well as carnal relics from Carolee Schneemann's body-centric performances in the 70s.
And Rihanna came close to the carnal authority of the young Tina Turner performing her hit "What's My Name" with the rapper Drake, in what had to be one of the sexiest performances the Grammys have seen.
Jason Ankeny of Allmusic called it "a record unparalleled in its sheer sensuality and carnal energy", writing that "Gaye's passions reach their boiling point With each performance laced with innuendo, each lyric a come-on, and each rhythm throbbing with lust, perhaps no other record has ever achieved the kind of sheer erotic force of Let's Get It On".
The high point of Mr. Winther's show on Friday was his performance of "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk," Rufus Wainwright's ruefully witty catalog of the carnal temptations of urban life and their addictive potential.
The actors evoke the suffocating carnal knowledge these two separate beings are forced to share, and that they publicly flaunt in an early performance in which they suddenly turn their heads and kiss on the mouth.
No, this takes us much further back, to the prehistoric dawn of art and of human consciousness, to the realisation that, as Lewis Mumford expressed it in The City in History, "the performance of art itself added something just as essential to primitive man's life as the carnal rewards of the hunt".
