Lolita My Love at the York

I really wanted to see it but my work schedule got in the way.

So basically these were my thoughts:

Most importantly, the show will never really work. It has a great score, great performers (Robert Sella, Caitlin Cohn, George Abud being the true stand outs) but it’s asking too much of an audience to sympathize with Humbert, honestly. Especially in this climate of #MeToo, a movement I support--while being a fan of the show--it's simply not possible. That said, there are really some beautiful moments in the show: Broken Promised Land, Sur Les Quais, even Tell Me, Tell Me. Lolita, Humbert and Quilty were perfectly cast and was rounded out with a nice ensemble. Though the ensemble of the show runs into this problem where they’re expected to be several different ages in the show — from teenagers to adults of several different classes — that if it were fully realized, you’d need a larger cast in order for it to work.

The other downside of this reconstruction is that no matter what the show doesn’t benefit from any of its added book parts. You could tell Erik Haagensen, the book writer, loves the piece and restored a lot of cut material. However, almost none of it works. Some things were cut for a reason. The addition of of Dr Ray made me felt bad for the actress playing her. She really had nothing to do besides sit in a chair, and at times she was involved in the action on stage which felt bizarre—like she wanted to change the way the story was told, but couldn’t. It got old really quickly. even Humberts song “I’ll Have Him At Last”—which is a weird song because the melody is lifted from “Bad Bad World” in Philadelphia but is very reminiscent of “I Must Have Her” from the Lerner demos.

The show ran 2 and a half hours long, and it desperately needed to be cut. I did not care for the “Going Going Gone” sequence — it was way too long and like most of the numbers, without the orchestrations, wasn’t even that exciting. But this one felt especially strange without them, as did “How Far Is It To The Next Town”. I should also say that Quilty was, many times, too over the top for my liking. He even played the role of Amy Pratt—the sex educator—in drag, which I HATED, and felt so out of taste with the rest of the show.

There were also some intentionally humorous moments that I thought were stupid but am told are Mufti "gags" Quilty began to play a song on the “guitar” and switches it to a “mandolin” during "Going, Going Gone" — and Humbert shot the strings off. First, Humberts gun was a cardboard cut out and so were Quiltys prop guitar/mandolin. It looked so cheesy in an absolutely mind blowingly idiotic way. Later, in “Farewell Little Dream”, Humbert shot at Charlotte with a nerf gun which was beyond idiotic. The moments I just mentioned felt like cheap attempts to make the show funnier. The shows humorous moments are very black and macabre/gallows humor. It has no business feeling like a cheap comedy hour...like, we are seeing "Lolita", right? And though I don’t know if there are pictures of it, I loved that Humbert had a top hat and cane with footlights for “Farewell Little Dream”. It was beautifully bleak.

The biggest problem I had was Jessica Ray as Charlotte. She was horribly miscast. She has a wonderful voice, but was not a strong actor at all. However I also got the sense that she was being told to hold back, and Charlotte is totally over the top and shrill. My guess is because it was directed by a woman who was understandably concerned about how the woman characters are portrayed that she wanted to make Charlotte seem more likeable, but she came across as boring and flavorless.

*SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER*

I was lastly very angry at the fact that her suicide was changed to an accidental killing. It makes a huge difference to me, and I endlessly questioned why they changed it. However, the ending of the doctor, Lolita and Charlotte closing in on Humbert in his mind was quite thrilling.

Would be wonderful if this lead to a proper production and recording, as nice as the old soundboard one is. The score is sick in my favorite way - it goes beyond gallows humor into something much more terrifying (Denise Nickerson's "Promise me you'll never leave me?" during "Tell Me, Tell Me" always makes me queasy). Marrying the plot of pedophilic rape with the jaunty late-60s swinger chic musical comedy sound is perfect translation of the novel's primary trick, which is to assault the reader with a constant contrast between what's happening and how it's being described. You're hearing jubilant, lovely tunes that wouldn't be out of place in, say, Henry Sweet Henry, but you're also being confronted with something truly sickening, so it's like the musical equivalent of cognitive dissonance.

Curious what the libretto is like, I'm only familiar with the songs which are so brilliant that you just need the right words linking them together.

I have a problem calling Lolita a bratty character. I think if the character was a boy, we wouldn't say the same thing at all. I think she's a confident teenage girl, and we're just led to think that she's bratty because we're seeing her under Humbert's gaze. But also, bratty or not, she doesn't deserve to be abused by HH. HH is totally whiney though. Besides some great one liners, his character is narcissistic and just awful.



@VD- when you say you were in an "accident version" of this play, what does that mean?

This thread re-spurred my curiosity in this show so I managed to hunt down a full recording of the '71 performance and the (or a) libretto. It ran just over two hours back then, so if the York version ran two and a half there was definitely some serious and unnecessary padding. The 71 version probably could've been trimmed as well - I think this show would work best in a no-intermission format.

I'm not familiar with the performance at the York, but the '71 version is arguably one of the great pieces of musical theatre. Its use of the format is so, so brilliant, and I can't imagine a version of this story that would be as effectively terrifying. It's also both (nearly) perfect and impossible - this show could not have a long life, not anywhere, not at any time, both because of its subject matter and because audiences are not going to turn up for this kind of shock.

Sweeney Todd and The Pillowman both have a certain winking edge that makes them feel like a game between the play and the audience, but the moment when Dolores realizes that her mother really is dead and that Humbert, who has just raped her the night before, is now her sole guardian, is a moment of such bleak, howling terror that it feels like an assault. This is particularly true when listening to the Nickerson recording, where she really is a child.

It's that moment that is such a perfect reflection of what the book does - employ Humbert's charms to blot over the horrible truths until the truths are too apparent to ignore. We can skate by on the funny, glittering words of Humbert and the score's toe-tapping, dark-humored bounce until we realize that we've come to a place where we've purchased a ticket and sat down and guffawed at a man abducting and entrapping a little girl to use sexually. Much like the Haneke film, Funny Games, Lolita My Love asks that primary question of "why are we watching this?" We merrily turn up to watch people get tortured and torn to shreds in horror films, so why does this feel so much worse?

I also think it does a terrific job, in the end scene, of highlighting the desolate place she is ultimately left in. It's a hard, harsh piece, and the fact that they were able to pack it with thirteen (!) incredible, often toe-tapping songs that also serve a metatextual purpose is its own miracle.

I haven't read the book since I was in college, but I'd love to know more about some of the context surrounding the book and its release. I feel like I'm missing an overall cultural aspect that it's commenting on - there's a big focus on psychiatrists and a kind of chic vulgarity in regards to what the Europeans were up to, which, I think, is the point (?) of the song about nymphets at the picnic, where Humbert disgusts everyone by talking about poets loving little girls, and yet at the same time Quilty is fawned over for his teleplay about brotherly incest.

I have a kind of half-awareness of the cultural atmosphere, but, much like how Anyone Can Whistle is now basically nonsensical because it was so pointedly parodying something that was very timely when it was written, I feel like something's been lost a little bit in translation in the nearly fifty years since this musical was written, and in the over sixty since the book was written.