Word: menken
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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THIS IS A LOVE SONG, OF COURSE. Aladdin the street rat is taking Princess Jasmine on a flight into the liberating skyland of first love. But the Tim Rice lyric, riding the lush carpet of Alan Menken's melody, also defines the sorcery of movie animation. Artists wave the wand of a pencil over a piece of paper and, like the most genial genie, create unbelievable sights, indescribable feelings. "Don't you dare close your eyes!/ A hundred thousand things to see!/ Hold your breath, it gets better...
...studio was just regaining its animation stride in 1989 when lyricist Howard Ashman (who with Menken wrote the songs for The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast before dying of AIDS last year) suggested a Disney cartoon musical of the Aladdin story. After he wrote six songs and a story treatment, Musker and Clements (The Adventures of the Great Mouse Detective, The Little Mermaid) took over. But something was wrong with the story. "It just wasn't compelling," Katzenberg says. "Aladdin's journey didn't engage." At first, the hero had a mother with a personality forceful enough...
Composer Alan Menken won four Oscars for the movies The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast with lyricist Howard Ashman. For the stage, they created Little Shop of Horrors. After Ashman died of AIDS in 1991, Menken tried various collaborators. WEIRD ROMANCE, which opened off-Broadway last week, shows how much he misses Ashman's storytelling. The two one-acts (book by Alan Brennert and lyrics by David Spencer) blend zippy tunes with cliche science fiction. A witty, upbeat song recalls how a boy fell in love with lab testing, and Ellen Greene sings gorgeous ballads. But what...
...does he allow a song-and-dance number to build to a rousing finale. The choreography, by Ortega and Peggy Holmes, is similarly strange. The musical outbursts do not grow organically from the film's other action, nor do they otherwise feel authentic, since the dancing look forced. Alan Menken's music would have sounded better under almost any other circumstances than these...
Still a score featuring music by Menken and lyrics by Jack Feldman provides the film's rare bright spots, but even these are bungled. Many of the musical numbers are staged so strangely that the character, when they begin singing, appear to have taken leave of their senses. Christian Bale, as the film's hero who dreams of escaping to the Southwest, is made to sing "Santa Fe" while ambling through a dusty, too picturesque New York street at night. The staging goes well beyond run-of-the-mill fantasy when it sends him leaping onto a horse and frolicking...