Word: nabokovs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...effect achieved through intense turquoise lighting of the higher recesses of the set above her bed. Shades of rose, violet and pale turquoise give way in the lighting of the last scenes to the wild-set and dark-set of hues. If Ford's themes foreshadow Sade, Poe and Nabokov, the combined effect of Colacecchia's set and Jonathan Miller's lighting evokes the same sense of demented, striving sensuality found in the eighteenth-century etchings of Piranesi...
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...
...problems involved in adapting Nabokov's story of Humbert 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...
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...
Like many novelists, Burgess keeps tabs on his colleagues. Unlike many of them, he is notably generous in his judgments. He admits to wishing that he had written Portnoy's Complaint and almost everything of Nabokov's. He dotes on Peter De Vries and finds Updike and Vidal "elegant" writers...