Louis Peitzman

<h1>NEW YORK — The former Mark Hellinger Theater — now operating as the Times Square Church — was the site of the librettist and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner’s greatest triumph. When “My Fair Lady,” the musical he wrote with Frederick Loewe, ended its six-year run in 1962, it had broken the record for the longest-running Broadway show. But nearly a decade later, the Hellinger became a reminder of Lerner’s most staggering failure.</h1>

Ditching his longtime collaborator Loewe in favor of younger, hipper composer John Barry — who gave us the James Bond theme — Lerner adapted Vladimir Nabokov’s classic novel “Lolita” into a musical. But in 1971, before “Lolita, My Love” could make its Broadway debut at the Hellinger, it closed after two disastrous tryouts in Philadelphia and Boston.

The main problem: the deeply uncomfortable subject matter. The show, much like the book it was based on, followed the notoriously unreliable narrator Humbert Humbert and his sexual obsession with the adolescent girl of the title. Here was the controversial novel — now with musical numbers.

Almost 50 years after its unceremonious ending, “Lolita, My Love” is finally getting its New York debut as part of the York Theater Company’s Musicals in Mufti series celebrating the Alan Jay Lerner centennial. (Lerner died in 1986.)

The script-in-hand production opens Sunday, with a revised book edited by Erik Haagensen, a playwright and frequent reworker of troubled classics. He pulled from six different Lerner scripts in an attempt to make the show more cohesive and perhaps digestible for a modern audience.

“You hear the title and immediately tense up,” said Emily Maltby, who is directing the York production. “But when I read it, I found that there was actually something rather interesting and rather important about this perspective on it.”

“Lolita, My Love” starred John Neville and Dorothy Loudon, who went on to win a Tony as Miss Hannigan in “Annie.” It is not the first musical flop to find new life in an era more willing to embrace complexity — or to celebrate the camp appeal of a show that, on paper, shouldn’t exist.

“Carrie,” based on the Stephen King novel, was enough of a disaster to inspire the title for “Not Since Carrie,” Ken Mandelbaum’s definitive chronicle of Broadway failures. That show got a second chance with a 2012 off-Broadway revival and was prominently featured in an episode of The CW’s “Riverdale” last year.

Even as a straight play, “Lolita” would be a tough sell: Edward Albee learned as much when his 1981 adaptation closed on Broadway after 12 performances.

But this production of “Lolita, My Love,” like the “Carrie” revival, is reckoning with where the last one went wrong. The most significant change from the Boston production is the frame narrative in which Humbert is confessing his crimes, now not to the audience but to a therapist, the unseen Dr. Ray.

In pushing back on Humbert’s version of events and his nebulous grasp on reality, the doctor helps expose the true depths of his broken psyche, ultimately forcing him to confront the gravity of his crimes.

“There is something very poignant and important about holding this character accountable for his actions and not just presenting the story as a series of events that happen between this man and this young girl,” Maltby said.

Its flaws notwithstanding, “Lolita, My Love” has something of a cult following. In “Not Since Carrie,” the show is described as “both a complete mistake and a superb adaptation, with a marvelous score and perfect leads.”

A bootleg tape of the Boston production is the only real record of the musical, although the songs “In the Broken-Promise Land of Fifteen” and “Going Going Gone” have been recorded by such artists as Robert Goulet and Shirley Bassey.

Haagensen, who has been fascinated by “Lolita, My Love” since he first read of the project as a high school senior in 1970, worked diligently to create a new book that continued Lerner’s work. Two of the scripts he relied on were written after the show had closed out of town.

“Lerner was struggling to find the right way to tell the story, which is in part why each draft has marked differences from the other ones, and I think he found it post-Boston,” Haagensen said.

The therapist framing device, which was in Lerner’s first draft but abandoned before Boston, turned up again in the librettist’s later rewrites. It was Haagensen’s decision to make Dr. Ray a woman, allowing her to serve as something of a surrogate for Lolita, who, as in the novel, exists more in Humbert’s imagination than as her own person.

Even with Haagensen’s edits, however, “Lolita, My Love” still centers Humbert over his victim. As Maltby acknowledged, “If you were to do an adaptation of ‘Lolita’ today, it wouldn’t look like this.”

James Morgan, the York’s producing artistic director, believes the show is worth the risk. He said he sent the new script, along with the 1971 Boston versions, to several female friends to get their perspective. All of them told him that “Lolita, My Love” was worth putting on, he said.

“People have been afraid of it,” Morgan said. “I guess it’s possible that we could be picketed by hundreds of people, but I think anyone who sees it will realize that it’s not being done for the wrong reasons.”

Other circumstances are likely to mitigate possible controversy. For one, this is a reading in a 160-seat theater, not a full production. For another, Caitlin Cohn, who is playing Lolita, is not an actual teenage girl but an actor in her early 20s. (In 1971, Annette Ferra played the role in Philadelphia, but was let go because she was considered too old for the part at 15. The Boston run starred 13-year-old Denise Nickerson, who went on to play Violet Beauregarde in the “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” film that same year.)

But for the cast and creative team, the appeal of this production — apart from celebrating a largely forgotten Lerner musical — is in the way it handles the aftermath of trauma, holding the Humberts of the world to task and allowing the title character to come into her own.

“You really do end up hearing her own voice,” Cohn said. “Audiences should hopefully feel very empowered by that — that even though this man tore apart her life, he didn’t tear apart everything that she is and will be.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="1793e8f2-989c-4481-b02a-e22c70819e03" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/theater/lolita-my-love-york-theater-company-alan-jay-lerner.html">The New York Times</a>.

An Infamous 'Lolita' Musical Gets a Belated New York Debut

Ditching his longtime collaborator Loewe in favor of younger, hipper composer John Barry — who gave us the James Bond theme — Lerner adapted Vladimir Nabokov’s classic novel “Lolita” into a musical.

An infamous 'Lolita' musical gets a belated New York debut

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Louis Peitzman

Articles written by the author

An infamous 'Lolita' musical gets a belated New York debut