![]() ![]() The musical is less in conversation with Nabokov’s novel than with Nabokov’s screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation of it and, more so, the film itself, which, to the novelist, was “a blurred skimpy glimpse of the marvelous picture I imagined.” This production opens with the title song, which enters on a horror-film tinkle, and then mingles tenderness and pain in the sweet agony of its waltz. ![]() In “ The Complete Lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner,” the editors ask, in a headnote, “How could songs and laughter be woven into a sinister story of a murderous pedophile?” In other words, how do you solve a problem like “Lolita”? You don’t, not entirely, but the attempt offers a rare view of a masterpiece. Its first act is weird and perfect the second indicates the limits of this salvage operation. “Lolita, My Love” runs through March 3rd, in a production directed by Emily Maltby, with a score reconstructed by Deniz Cordell and a script, edited by Erik Haagensen, from six of Lerner’s drafts, including two written after the show closed. On the occasion of Lerner’s centenary, the York Theatre Company is presenting concert stagings of three of the bombs that followed the librettist’s great triumphs, with composer Frederick Loewe. In “ Not Since Carrie: 40 Years of Broadway Musical Flops,” Ken Mandelbaum assigned “Lolita, My Love” “the singular distinction of being both a complete mistake and a superb adaptation, with a marvelous score and perfect leads, of one of the great novels of the twentieth century.” In “ One More Kiss: The Broadway Musical in the 1970s,” Ethan Mordden called it “too dark to live”: “a tragic romance that is too sinful to be romance.” Yet this renowned catastrophe has its defenders. “Lolita, My Love” was relegated to a special place in the history of flops. The show shut down for repairs and, in March, reopened in Boston, with a new director and a fresh nymphet-thirteen-year-old Denise Nickerson, who had recently completed her role as Violet Beauregarde in “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.” The Boston run also expired prematurely, after nine shows. ![]() The reviews of “Lolita, My Love” had been savage, and the cast was confounded. In February, 1971, a Broadway-bound musical version of Vladimir Nabokov’s “ Lolita,” with a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and a score by John Barry, went to Philadelphia, for a five-week tryout that gave out eleven nights after opening. ![]()
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