Word: ashman
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With an emotional resonance rare in movies and a pleasing score by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, Beauty and the Beast gets the comic leavening it needs from a nice modification of the Seven Dwarfs. The prince's household staff, who labor under the same curse, have been changed into candlesticks (Jerry Orbach), teapots (Angela Lansbury), clocks (David Ogden Stiers) and armoires (Jo Anne Worley). In the Be Our Guest number, watch closely for the swimming spoons, the dishes stacked in Eiffel Tower formation, the tankards in chorale. The voluptuousness of visual detail offers proof, if any more were needed...
...dicing, flaying and serving of les poissons. Ursula (Pat Carroll) the sea witch is a fat, shimmying squid with malefic revenge in mind -- the sort of Disney horror queen who has given kids nightmares for a half-century. All these characters are given witty, hummable pop songs by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken (the Little Shop of Horrors team), a reminder that the Hollywood cartoon has become the last, best refuge of the Broadway musical...
Written by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken...
Written by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken...
WHAT GAVE the staged Little Shop its appeal was the purity of its homage to Cliche. Writer and lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken built their Little Shop out of an inestimable number of dramatic, social, cinematic and musical commonplaces. Superficially, it followed the plot of the Corman picture, but it also obeyed dramatic rules enforced through the millenia: the Ashman/Menken Little Shop was a carefully structured Greek tragedy, replete with chorus, hero, dilemma, tragic flaw, catastrophic misstep and ultimate retribution. Snappy Chiffons-type songs and bouffant hairdos notwithstanding, the resolution of Little Shop was closer to that...