Sep 23, 2018 - US dollars tiny angel lolita tgp “One. Interestingly on Fire Island, there is no place else, so we listened to our.
Stanley Kubrick was a sucker for order, so he might have appreciated the desire to catalogue his career. However, since the acclaimed director's films often warn against placing too much faith in systems, perhaps he knew that this way madness lies.Frankly, most of Kubrick's films have fair claim to being number one, so establishing first amongst equals means there were some hard choices along the way – just try not to trigger the doomsday device or start swinging the axe if you don't agree.Let's open the pod bay doors and enter an enigmatic, exceptional body of work.
Fear and Desire (1953).
You can buy the cast album here:Here's what Mandelbaum says in Not Since Carrie:Prettybelle was near-impossible material uneasily adapted for the musical stage. Lolita, My Love (Philadelphia; Feb 16, ’71; closed on the road) has 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. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita had already been transferred to the screen by Stanley Kubrick and Nabokov, but in a considerably bowdlerized version. Alan Jay Lerner decided to make Nabokov’s tale of a middle-aged professor’s passion for a preteenage nymphet into a musical, and it was to become the first of the five flops with which Lerner ended his stage career.
John Barry, who would later write Billy for the West End and The Little Prince and the Aviator for Broadway, was the composer. The show opened in Philadelphia to terrible reviews and shut down for repairs. Director Tito Capobianco (who had directed Beverly Sills in many of her operatic triumphs) was replaced by Noel Willman, who had done Darling of the Day and Love Match, neither of which was mentioned in his Lolita program bio.
Danny Daniels, who had replaced Jack Cole during rehearsals, was replaced by Dan Siretta, and the original Lolita, considered too ripe at fifteen, was replaced by a thirteen-year-old. The show reopened in Boston, but while the critics there appreciated the show’s strengths, business was nonexistent. Lolita, My Love canceled its scheduled opening at the Mark Hellinger Theatre, where Lerner’s My Fair Lady, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever and Coco had played. Its original cost, $ 650,000, had, with all the changes, ballooned to $ 900,000. When Nabokov first rejected the idea of amovie based on his novel, he said: “It was perfectly all right for me to imagine a twelve-year-old Lolita. She only existed in my head. But to make a real twelve-year-old play such a part would be sinful and immoral, and I will never consent to it.” Nabokov foresaw exactly what the musical’s main problem would be: the events of the novel are far more palatable when imagined than when acted out onstage, where, without Nabakov’s powerful writing, they become distasteful and unappealing.
But Lolita, My Love had a great deal going for it. Shakespearean actor John Neville— in a role rejected by Richard Burton—was a marvelous hero, even singing well, and Dorothy Loudon, still in the midst of her flop period, was ideal as the vulgar Charlotte Haze; one of the show’s problems was that audiences missed Loudon terribly after she was killed off at the end of the first act. Lerner’s lyrics were frequently dazzling, and Barry’s music indicated genuine talent as a theatre composer only hinted at in his other stage scores. “In the Broken Promise Land of Fifteen” for Humbert, a showstopper for Loudon called “Sur les Quais,” a nightmarish, cross-country sequence called “How Far Is It to the Next Town,” and most of the other songs demonstrate how well Lerner and Barry succeeded in musicalizing the characters. When granting his blessing to the project, Nabokov said, “Mr.
Lerner is most talented and an excellent classicist. If you have to make a musical version of Lolita, he is the one to do it.” Indeed, Lolita, My Love was as good a musical as could have been made from the novel, and Humbert was allowed to be as vivid and tragic a hero as he was in the book. But the musical was a distinguished work that could never have succeeded, a grand attempt at the impossible. Ten years later, Edward Albee adapted the novel to the stage, and the result, with Donald Sutherland as Humbert, closed after twelve performances. An extremely ill -conceived and awkward adaptation, it made one appreciate what fine work Lerner had done in a lost cause.
With all due respect to Ken Mandelbaum, he's completely off his rocker in regards to Lolita, My Love. I saw the last performance of it in Boston and it was truly an embarrassment, with a couple of terrific songs (but not more than a couple) and a completely misconceived production.
The book reduces what is, essentially, a metaphoric literary conceit to a literal tale of pedophilia, and the performances were, well, maybe desperate is the best word. Of the many super-flops I've had the privilege to witness, only a few compare in hopelessness, and only Carrie compares in terms of audacious hopelessness. Many others - Cafe Crown, The Student Gypsy, Nowhere to Go But Up - were hopeless, and a few of them had assets. But Lolita, My Love was a big time craziness, precious in its mad wrong-headedness. I never saw Prettybelle, but I suspect it might also qualify.