Alan Menken Scores Disney

While not all Disney films are musicals, it can sometimes seem that they all are!

The real rush of films in that format came from the immense success of 1989's film The Little Mermaid, which was made into a Broadway-style musical during production. When it won two Academy Awards, Disney knew a good thing when they saw it; subsequent 1990s releases were nearly all musicals, and those that didn't conform to the conventional format still boasted soundtracks with big-name composers. However much of the popularity of the Disney musical has been because of one notable man: Alan Menken.

Menken was born into a Jewish family in New York City in 1949, and developed a passion for music at a very early age. In between school, he learned both the piano and the violin, and studied music at NYU. He even drafted several theater productions in the 1970's, however, they were never fully produced after their initial run. A great opportunity was afforded him, when he began working with the lyricist Howard Ashman, for the Off Broadway shows God Bless You Mr. Rosewater and Little Shop of Horrors.

Menken came to work for Disney because of this partnership with Ashman. Ashman had contributed a song to the Disney film Oliver and Company; in what is now a famous story, he got his hands on the production notes for The Little Mermaid and proposed changing the stuffy British butler crab character to a Jamaican, so that calypso-style music could be incorporated throughout the film. With that suggestion, the entire film was re-vamped into a Broadway-style musical. Ashman called on his writing partner to work with him, and the resulting soundtrack won Best Score and Best Song at the 1990 Oscars. Menken and Ashman worked together on the music for Beauty and the Beast, which also won double Oscars, but Howard died in 1991 from complications of AIDS.

Over the years, Tim Rice, Stephen Schwartz, and Jack Feldman were all collaborators on Disney projects with Menken. He has worked on Aladdin, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Enchanted, and 2010's Tangled. He's won eight Oscars for his work in music, and has been nominated a total of nineteen times. In addition to movie work, Menken is well known for his musicals, having been nominated for Tony awards for his adaptations of Beauty and Mermaid, and won seven Golden Globe awards and eleven Grammys.

by: Robert Nickel

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