Word: menken
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
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...
While the thought of being revealed in a Menken expose left many of America's most prominent citizens quaking in their shoes, the author himself seems to simply accept his prejudices as of a part of life. What might surprise many readers of the diary is the actual extent to which Mencken fails to hold himself and his personal views up to his usually rigorous standard of review...