Word: menken
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Shrek the movie differs from the animated hits that Disney has brought to the stage in several important ways. For one thing, it's not a musical - which means no Elton John or Howard Ashman-Alan Menken songs to build a Broadway score around. More crucially, it is the first of the computer-animated films to be turned into theater - which presents different challenges. The romantic sweep and handcrafted classicism of Disney's earlier films could in no way be translated literally to the stage - and that inspired directors like Julie Taymor (The Lion King) and Francesca Zambello (The Little...
...Other categories are less obscure than infuriating. After disqualifying Alan Menken's score for Enchantment, the Academy nominated three of his tunes for Best Song. The Foreign Language Film category, almost always a botch, had disqualified The Diving Bell and the Butterfly because its screenwriter is English and its director American. (That's Julian Schnabel, who still copped a Best Director nomination). Ang Lee's Chinese-language erotic thriller Lust, Caution was missing, as was The Romanian drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, the Palme d'Or winner at Cannes and a near-unanimous critics' fave. The snubbing...
...story itself has more romantic resonance than some of the more self-important Disney tales. Hans Christian Andersen gets a lot of the credit for that, but book writer Doug Wright (Grey Gardens, I Am My Own Wife) at least managed not to screw it up. Composer Alan Menken (with Glenn Slater replacing the late Howard Ashman as lyricist) has added several catchy new songs to his already fine score; the Broadway-razzmatazz number in which the Ursula, the sea witch (a sharp Sherie Renee Scott), celebrates her evil ways, "I Want the Good Times Back," would have made...
...campaign trail, Williams has some help from manager Jack Menken (Christopher Walken) and joke-turned-speech writer Eddie Langston (acerbic standup comic Lewis Black), who, despite their pitch-perfect performances largely sing backup to their leading...
...this is kind of a "legends" show, with actors pretending to be stars singing their late great hits. Yes, it'd be better if we had composers who could write story songs that translated into hit songs, the way Alan Menken and Tim Rice did for a few years with the Disney animated features that produced "A Whole New World." But since we don't, and haven't for ages, we can do worse than to honor classic pop, including the kind few people realized was classic till...