Word: lerner
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...solve these problems Alan Jay Lerner seems to have turned more than once to Stanley Kubrick's movie version. The killing of Quilty takes place at the very beginning, making the entire story a flashback. Quilty is presented as a real character, popping up continuously throughout the action. The advances Lolita's mother makes to Humbert are set up almost exactly as they were in the movie...
...When Lerner decides to be original, his changes are always vulgar, simplistic, or downright perverse. The killing of Quilty doesn't take place in an eerie, Poe-like mansion, but at a party in Arizona in front of Quilty's freaky set of disciples, thus giving Lerner a chance for a rousing song-and-dance opening. The Enchanted Hunters Motel where Lolita seduces Humbert is changed to the Bed-D-Bv Motel, full of whores and Mr. and Mrs. John Smiths. And Lerner perversely places Humbert's final visit with the married, pregnant Lolita at the very end, enabling...
What is most annoying about Lerner's adaptation is its complete lack of a moral sense. Certainly Nabokov's book wasn't written to make parents more vigilant in bringing up their children, but there is a real feeling that what Humbert has done is wrong, that he has destroyed a girl's childhood. This idea is completely missing from the musical, and without it we are almost forced to root for Humbert as he tries to violate Lolita. The actual seduction is almost sickeningly sentimental...
...what about a cast? Producer Twain thought, rightly (after the film), that James Mason was wrong for Humbert. Richard Burton was an early choice, but after one musical (Lerner's Camelof), Burton decided: "I have no desire to repeat this fascinating but exacting experiment." In his place will go John Neville, 45, a first-rank British actor. "When I was first approached," he admits, "my feeling was that I didn't see how it could be done with taste...
...trust Lerner." (Presumably, Coco Chanel also trusts Lerner.) The title role, naturally, is far more ticklish. The novel described Lolita as a "mixture of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity." And, as Humbert said, "you have to be an artist and a madman with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in order to discern by certain ineffable signs the little deadly demon among the wholesome children...