Word: lolitas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...TURNING Lolita into a musical was a bad idea from the start. Nabokov's novel dazzled us with its wit and moved us with its poetry. Lolita, My Love. now in pre-Broadway tryouts at the Schubert, has chucked the wit and the poetry in favor of a plodding, graceless retelling of the plot in the tradition of garish, simple-minded musical comedy...
...Humbert's passion for thirteen-year-old Dolores Haze are huge. A major character, Clare Quilty, doesn't appear until the last scene of the book, though his presence is felt throughout. Occasionally the entire story-line teeters on the brink of unreality, as when Quilty follows Humbert and Lolita from motel to motel across the country. And the whole plot of the novel is seen through the decidedly abnormal eye sof Humbert: to make it objective is inevitably to falsify...
...find highly objectionable the title of your piece "Profit Without Honor," [Dec. 21] on the musical adaptation of Lolita, as well as your sermonet on the scruples that I once happened to voice concerning its filming. When cast in the title role of Kubrick's neither very sinful nor very immoral picture, Miss Lyon was a well-chaperoned young lady, and I suspect that her Broadway successor will be as old as she was at the time. Fourteen is not twelve, 1970 is not 1958, and the sum of $150,000 is not correct...
Having profited if not learned from the experience, Nabokov in 1969 dealt away the rights to turn Lolita into−what else?−a Broadway musical. While the author seemed calm at the prospect, readers who consider the novel a masterpiece could only be horrified at what Broadway might do to Lolita. At any rate, this time Nabokov decided not to be a party to the adaptation himself. He waived script approval, though he did retain veto power over the choice of the adapter and composer. As it happened, Librettist Alan Jay Lerner (My Fair Lady, Coco) was at that...
...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...