Word: menken
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...ornamentation and a triumph of the restorer's art. Disney is hoping the New Amsterdam will be an economic triumph too, as home to a lucrative stream of wildly successful Disney stage shows. First up, in May, is a concert version of King David, a new musical by Alan Menken and Tim Rice...
Judge Frollo, spoken and sung by Tony Jay--a classically-trained stage actor--steals the show as Disney's greatest villain since Snow White's wicked Queen herself. Frollo's solo "Hellfire" combines the best of the score of Alan Menken (music man for all five of Disney's last animated features) with riveting, spooky animation...
Unfortunately, the score is not Menken's greatest. Musical highlights besides "Hellfire" include the opening "Bells of Notre Dame" and "Heaven's Light," but none of these match "Circle of Life" from "The Lion King" or "A Whole New World" from "Aladdin...
...figure that where they go, into melodrama or political sagas, the audience will follow. With The Hunchback of Notre Dame, directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise (who made Beauty and the Beast) have splashed the broody emotions of Victor Hugo's epic novel with a bold, dazzling palette. Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz (Pocahontas) have written the largest, most imposing score yet for an animated film. The result is a grand cartoon cathedral, teeming with gargoyles and treachery, hopeless love and tortured lust...
...HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (June 21), the Disney animated feature that recasts Quasimodo as a semi-cute young fellow who learns the T. M. of F., also promises the vaulting swank of Alan Menken at his most pop-eratic and the saving japery of three witty gargoyles...