#bc i dont know if cinematography can really hold that spell for long enough

[doloresdisparue]

i think one reason why the musical works so well for me is that music is one of the few ways that a changing medium can come close to emulating the effect of nabokovs dazzling prose. music affects (many) people on an emotional level and catchy music and rhymes can pull you along just as fast if you let your guard down. there's a reason "dante, petrach and poe" is maybe the catchiest tune in the show - it's also humbert at his most blatantly abject. if you don't listen to the lyrics you're bopping along before you know it even though this man with his lovely singing is going into great detail about the sex appeal of (quote) "barely pubescent" children.

just like in the novel humbert is pulling out all the stops of the medium to get the audience on his side, utilising the trappings of musical and emotions associated with certain numbers and types of music to package the awful things he's saying - and the lyrics are more explicit than most adaptations ever dared to be regarding the full horror of the story. you could write an analysis like this about probably each of the songs individually (and ideally someone who knows more about music theory than me should do that) but especially with "dante" and "lolita" the love song/lament that either opens or closes the show depending on the version the lyrics are so spine crawling (arguably also tell me, tell me, though the context does more than the lyrics there) while the music invites you immediately to side with the figure performing them.

any adaptation that can't rely fully on nabokov's prose needs to find something equally seductive and that's a hurdle for most other mediums that i think really bizarrely makes the musical stage very well suited to tell "lolita".