It seems wild to consider a time when Disney musicals had disrupter status in Broadway and the West End. But when they broke new ground in bringing their animated stories to the stage in the 1990s — thanks in no small part to Alan Menken’s toe-tapping musical contributions — it turned out that they were the outsiders of the industry.
“Broadway had a challenge understanding what a company like Disney would be like on Broadway,” says Menken, the songwriter responsible for its first stage show, Beauty and the Beast, and many that followed. “The theatre community is a tight community that has high standards in terms of how musical is created and where it comes from. Anything that’s new, they look at it with scepticism.”
Indeed when he first knew that Disney wanted to bring their stories to the stage, “I was afraid, is it going to be like one of those parks shows, with somebody walking around with a foam head? It was, of course, so much more than that.”
Musicals are emotional, almost by definition. They require a storyline in which there’s a character that has something they long for
Undoubtedly. 28 years since Disney breathed new life into musical theatre, their shows are still guaranteed crowd-pleasers. The musical of Aladdin (another of Menken’s projects) and The Lion King are still resident on Broadway. In London’s West End, you’ll find Frozen, Mary Poppins and The Lion King, with Newsies elsewhere in the city.
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The longevity has a simple explanation, believes Menken. “Musicals are emotional, almost by definition. They require a storyline in which there’s a character that has something they long for. How they fight to get that to happen is a large part of how most musicals are constructed,” he says. “Also, so many musicals are adaptations, so people arrive with a comfort about the basic storyline, and are able to absorb how the songs interpret that and open that up.”
Menken is speaking, polished and enthusiastic despite his time zone and workload, on Zoom from his studio in northern Westchester, on the outskirts of New York, with mixing boards and instruments crammed in the background. “I’d show you my awards cabinet,” he says, nodding towards his right. “But I think my wife might freak out.”
The week we speak, he’s putting the finishing touches to Disney’s live-action version of The Little Mermaid, promoting the animated film Spellbound, readying a regional theatre premiere of Hercules, and overseeing a new London production of another of his musical offsprings, Sister Act.
In between these projects, he made time to hop over to London’s West End to see the revamped production of Beauty and the Beast, now on tour, with Dublin its next stop.
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Led by the choreographer of the original stage show, Matt West, this modernised Beauty and the Beast stays faithful to the 1991 Disney film of a prince (here, Shaq Taylor) cursed by being transformed into a beast, and his servants into household objects. When he encounters — well, imprisons — the beautiful bookworm Belle (played by Courtney Stapleton), all hopes are on her undoing the curse.
The stage effects are magical, really magical. It’s an inventive, touching and powerful production. Certain songs burst forth like they never have before
There are new touches, some large, some small. You’ll recognise former X Factor winner Sam Bailey as Mrs Potts. There’s a modernised dynamic between the Beast and Belle, and Gaston (Tom Senior) and his sidekick Le Fou (Louis Stockil). And if the recent kerfuffle over ethnically diverse casts in Prime Video’s Rings of Power and the remake of The Little Mermaid irked, look away now.
To these wide eyes, the stage design is its crowning glory. It’s a no-expense-spared look, interweaving costumes, choreography, technology and music in a masterful spectacle of storytelling. “The stage effects are magical, really magical. It’s an inventive, touching and powerful production,” says Menken. Musically, “there are a couple of songs that we’ve removed to make it tighter. Certain songs burst forth like they never have before — Belle brought down the house with A Change in Me. Another song that doesn’t get much attention, Human Again, really shone. Be Our Guest was wonderful. And If I Can’t Love Her. The song Beauty and the Beast, that did okay too.”
Menken, along with his late collaborator, the lyricist Howard Ashman, began writing the songs that now define the story back in 1989. Menken and his family had just bought his place in northern Westchester, and Ashman had just moved to nearby Fishkill with his partner Bill. “I remember it being a wonderful time of us working in my studio. The first songs we sent out were Belle and Be Our Guest. We sent via FedEx those days because was no internet, and Howard has such trepidation about what the studio were going to say about a seven-minute opening number. Of course they just said it was great. We were breaking open a lot of doors for musical theatre in the writing of Beauty and the Beast.
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“But there were also moments of intense pain, even before I knew what the cause was. I could have suspected why, but I just blocked it out. You don’t want to think that you’re losing your collaborator. He gave excuses for what’s going on with him health-wise, and I gratefully bought them.”
Unbeknown to Menken, Ashman had Aids, “going all the way back to when The Little Shop of Horrors movie came out in 1986. He kept it to himself, because if you’re in the public with it, that was the end of your career.”
The joy of writing musical theatre is letting go of your own life. It’s not like we’re songwriters writing an album about our love life
But once they returned home after winning The Little Mermaid’s two Oscars for Best Score and Best Original Song (for Under the Sea) in the 1989 Academy Awards, the truth came out.
“So almost all the work for Beauty and the Beast was done under the shadow of us knowing that his days were numbered. And trying to cover that up, stay positive and keep moving forward in the face of that,” Menken recalls.
The nature of the musical helped deflect the truth of the reality. “The joy of writing musical theatre is letting go of your own life. It’s not like we’re songwriters writing an album about our love life.
“So you have moments like Gaston, which are like a Sigmund Romberg romp, but with the conceit that it’s these low-lifes singing about what a great guy this log-head Neanderthal Gaston [is]. It was hilarious when Howard put those lyrics in front of me. I just was laughing the whole time I was setting it.
“But there were times where… one time he picked up a Walkman Pro, which was the creme de la creme of machines then, but it wasn’t working right. He hurled it and smashed it against the wall. There were many instances like that, where what was bubbling under was so pained and so intense. But at the end of the day for Howard and I, the finished product supersedes any other personal considerations, because we throw ourselves into these musicals.”
Once the soundtrack was complete, the pair moved on to Aladdin. But Ashman died six months before Beauty and the Beast was released, and never saw the finished film. “It’s always got that poignancy,” says Menken quietly. “You get to the end of the movie, and there’s a dedication to Howard, and it always tears my heart out.”
The film opened to immediate success. A mark of Menken and Ashman’s joint legacy, it won Oscars for Best Original Score and Best Original Song, in addition to the film’s other nominations of Best Original Song (again), and Best Sound.
I discuss with my therapist a lot. Do I want to take it easy? No. Do I want to do something other than simply be a songwriting machine? Perhaps. But I love it
When it was adapted into a stage show, Tim Rice proved the only person able to fill Ashman’s shoes. “We were proud of the fact we able to create a wedding of those two lyricists’ work, and it’s a very cohesive and effective score,” Menken reflects.
Today, there’s no sign of slowing down for Menken. In addition to this week’s workload, he’s also working on Disenchanted (the Irish-shot sequel to Enchanted), and an upcoming musical adaptation of Night at the Museum.
After becoming one of a handful of talents to win all top-tier US awards — in his cabinet, we would have seen sparkling rows of Emmys, Grammys, Oscars and Tony awards — it begs the question: where can he go from here?
“That’s the question I ask myself all the time, and I don’t actually have an answer,” he says. “I discuss with my therapist a lot. Do I want to take it easy? No. Do I want to do something other than simply be a songwriting machine? Perhaps. But I love it.”
Beauty and the Beast plays at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin between November 24 and January 8, 2023
