The venue formerly known as the 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.

Turning from his longtime collaborator Loewe to the younger, hipper composer John Barry — the man 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 out-of-town 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 titular adolescent girl. Here was the most controversial novel of all time — 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.)