Word: lolitas
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...