Word: menken
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...different." This Christmas Carol grafts part of Dickens' biography (his days as a child laborer, his father's trip to debtors' prison) onto Scrooge. It makes him less a villain than a victim of his times. "Scrooge is really every one of us," notes the show's composer, Alan Menken. "We all have a tendency to watch out for our interests and to avoid taking responsibility for the fate of the world...
...heart, though, Aladdin and its kin were the merest, dearest emotional travelogues. They alighted on a dream here, a resentment there; they poked at a feeling until it sang a perky or rhapsodic Alan Menken tune. Nothing was lacking in these terrific movies, but something was missing: primal anguish, the kind that made children wet the seats of movie palaces more than a half- century ago as they watched Snow White succumb to the poison apple or Bambi's mother die from a hunter's shotgun blast. Disney cartoons were often the first films kids saw and the first that...
Despite all the cautionary tales, they keep coming. Disney, last year's disastrous Newsies notwithstanding, seems on the verge of turning its hegemonic attentions to live-action musicals: the studio has the splendid composer Danny Elfman (The Simpsons, Tim Burton's films) and Alan Menken, & Newsies' composer, each developing a new live-action movie musical, plus Oliver Stone in preproduction on Evita...
...creator of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin for Disney, Menken has almost single-handedly revived the movie musical, albeit in cartoon form. And with the success of Disney's giddy, macabre new animated musical The Nightmare Before Christmas (it is the most popular movie in America right now), we are in a new golden era: Disney is to the '90s what MGM was to the '50s. "We came in with real respect for the established traditions of the American musical," Menken says of his blockbuster cartoon movies. Except, of course, for the tradition of filming actors...
...filmmakers, and it seems axiomatic that if some new species of live-action long-form musical is to evolve, it will owe at least as much to R.E.M.'s video Everybody Hurts, say, as to Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis. A big problem with Newsies, admits Menken, was that "it didn't resemble a video enough. There weren't enough camera angles...