The Music of Magical Worlds. An Exclusive Interview with Alan Menken

Everyone knows Alan Menken – the composer, author of the famous animated films released by the Walt Disney Animation Studios – The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Enchanted, Tangled. Even those who do not know who wrote the songs familiar from childhood – several generations grew up singing them, rejoicing in the melody, noting their special “brightness” and “fabulousness.” You must be a very kind person to write such music. The music scores of movies and musicals, not only meant for kids, are saturated with the very empathy, that we all truly lack today (Little Shop of Horrors, Enchanted, A Christmas Carol, Sister Act, Leap of Faith, Newsies, etc.).

Alan Menken is an eight-time Oscar winner and has repeatedly won the Emmy, Grammy, Golden Globe, and Tony Alan Menken celebrated his 75th birthday this July. It so happened that his first fantasy animated film The Little Mermaid (Walt Disney Feature Animation) also celebrates its anniversary this year – 35 years since its release. Two years ago, it was included in the US National Film Registry as a National Treasure. And fifteen years ago, the Little Mermaid was turned into a Broadway musical (2008-2009), followed by multiple regional tours of the production across the US and Canada.

We spoke to the legendary composer about the birth and life of this momentous creation.

Lisa Monde: The Little Mermaid animated film celebrates its 35th anniversary! So many generations grew up with The Little Mermaid, at least three generations if not more. We all know your songs, we love your music, we all sing it. I have heard that there is a prequel and a sequel to The Little Mermaid animated film – even though I cannot say I’ve watched them…

Alan Menken: I haven’t watched them either. You know, I think it’s great to give young writers work and opportunity but I’m not a huge fan of remakes, sequels. As part of being associated with Disney is that they are going to do these cheaper knockoffs, and I don’t love them, I don’t watch them, I would much rather they come to me if they wanted to do an actual sequel but it happened to all of them – The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, there were also a couple of Aladdins along the way, even The Hunchback  – I do not consider any of those to be an actual continuation of our initial musicals – I wouldn’t recommend anybody to watch them. But that’s how Disney works – there is going to be the original and then the cruise ship version of the show, the shows in the parks or ice shows for that matter – I prefer they use the original material whenever possible.

LM: “Sequel is never an equal,” as they say. You can’t beat the original.

AM: Sequels are hard… For example, with Disenchanted I was very happy with the score, but you can never top that original concept. That was a once-in-a-lifetime idea. But if we are going to do sequels – come to the people who created the original, the DNA of it.

LM: That would make sense. The Little Mermaid had so many iterations – there is the animated film that we all know and love, there was the Broadway musical which ran for quite some time, and then in 2023, a new movie came out. Which version of this creation of yours is your favorite?

AM: Well, I think you have to go with the original – it is the motherload, the touchstone for everything that followed at Disney Animation. And it was so much due to the brilliance of Howard Ashman, The Little Mermaid was basically the follow-up to the Little Shop of Horrors. I was just excited to do another show together with Howard, albeit for animation. I never knew it was going to have the impact that it had which was obviously enormous.

LM: Whose voice of Ariel do you love the most? Which one is closest to your heart? It’s probably a trick question because there were so many amazing singers who sang for Ariel.

AM:  Howard Ashman. There are demos – he and I gave the characters their first voice. That’s really the blueprint. Obviously, Jodi Benson – we both go back with Jodi to our earliest days of writing in theatre. I love Sierra Boggess who played it on Broadway and Halle Bailey who sang in the movie. But nobody can ever truly replace Jodi Benson or top that.

 

Such a large-scale and technically complex stage show turned out to be too expensive, and the directors had to make some changes and adjustments for touring and regional productions. That allowed millions of residents of both European countries and South America, as well as Japan and the Philippines, to enjoy such wonderful songs (with lyrics by Howard Ashman) as Under the Sea, Part of Your World, Poor Unfortunate Souls, Les Poissons, Kiss the Girl, Fathoms Below (lyrics by Howard Ashman & Glenn Slater), She Is in Love, Human Stuff, The World Above (lyrics by Glenn Slater) etc., in a variety of productions in different languages.

 

LM: How do you feel about your shows in other languages? It’s one thing when you hear the lyrics and compose music that goes with those lyrics but with the translated texts you hear your music in a completely different language. What is that experience like?

AM: It’s great, I love it. It helps confirm the power of music to deliver a message. I think of music as a very specific vocabulary. There are certain shows that you hear in another language, and it really resonates and sometimes it feels a little strange. It depends but it’s always wonderful.

LM: Did you ever have to adjust the music to fit the language? Since what in one language can be said in one syllable in another – may require three…

AM: Very seldom. The art of a translator is pretty incredible – what we do is we get the original lyric in English, the literal translation of what it is in another language, and then how it has been adjusted to fit the music. For instance – A Whole New World in French is Ce Rêve Bleu – A Blue Dream, but it works. So, it’s an amazing art form. We just opened Hercules in Hamburg, in German. And in terms of sensibility – Hunchback was a much more natural transition into German than Hercules, but it’s worked beautifully. I bless these translators. And my music team is amazing in making adjustments.

LM: When you listen to your creations in another language – have you ever felt like it sounds better in another language than the original?

AM: Yes! Partly because in terms of German and in terms of Hunchback – Hunchback has such a classical undertone – and the German language is really the main language of classical music – of Beethoven and Brahms and Bach and Mozart…so yes it was a very powerful experience.

 

The life of the stage version of the musical The Little Mermaid (with the book by Doug Wright and lyrics by Howard Ashman and Glenn Slater) continues, and we will see many more revivals, including those that will use new technologies in the field of virtual reality. After all, the underwater world, like no other, attracts both adults and children with its mystery and colorfulness. The immersive experience will necessarily allow future viewers to see Ariel, Ursula, Prince Eric, King Triton, Sebastian, and other heroes of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale face-to-face.

Animation artist Glen Keane, who worked as an animator at Disney Studios for more than 40 years and used the traditional hand-painted cel method of animation when working on the original of The Little Mermaid, brings it to virtual reality by sketching Ariel in 3D using Tilt Brush in 2015 (see the 3D trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSbkn6mCfXE ).

The Disney Theatrical Group has already created the Circle of the Life 360 experience, featuring one of the main musical numbers from The Lion King show with the help of cutting-edge virtual reality technology, which transports the viewers right into the center of the musical numbers, thanks to a specific 360 video projection technology. So, the spectators should only have a little patience – they won’t have to wait long before meeting the Little Mermaid in the virtual world. We wanted to know about Alan Menken’s attitude to new technologies and the virtual reality that his fairy-tale worlds will soon turn into.

 

LM: Technology is ever evolving and entering the world of theatre, VR and AR technologies are giving us new opportunities for sets – we see them projected on screens. And it is fantastic but creates a very different world in theatre. How do you feel about AI, VR, and AR in theatre?

AM: I think it’s all great, but a musical is a musical, it can be a stage musical, a film musical, a concept album musical, it can be a musical YouTube video – anytime someone is singing lyrics with the goal of delivering a story, a message, an experience – that in its own way is a musical. The Beatles were doing musicals with their videos. In our classic sense of a stage musical what you want to create is a structure that is then transferrable between casts, from community theatre to Broadway, to a theatre in Germany or in London, and then to a film, into animation, onto television… I love VR. I just got my Oculus and I have tried Vision Pro – it’s very immersive. It helps block out the outside world. Unique and wonderful.

Film musicals have been amazing. And now we have entered the times when cinema is not happening like it used to. Will it come back? Maybe. Talk about musicals going to streaming – I can’t say it’s perfect, it has nothing to do with the Golden Age of musicals, but at the same time that is the world we live in – so we need to make use of that medium in the best possible way.

     Disney’s attempt to create a remake of The Little Mermaid in the live-action format took place in 2023. Director Rob Marshall transferred the action from the animated film almost frame-by-frame: the characters are the same, they sing the same songs written by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman from the original movie, and the relationships between the characters develop and get resolved similarly. However, it seems like the time goes by slower: the “lengthiness” has a negative impact on the emotional perception of the story.  The additionally written songs (with lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda) – Wild Uncharted Waters and For the First Time differ from the original music score of The Little Mermaid. The scene with the rapping gannet Scuttle, joined by the crab Sebastian, – Scuttlebutt, seems a little bit out of place. However, Alan Menken has a very positive outlook on those changes.

 

LM: How did you feel about the 2023 movie?

AM: I loved it! I love the Broadway show and the live-action movie. I loved that we had other directors who came and lent their vision or their approach to telling the story. On the Broadway show, I got to work with Glenn Slater who was a collaborator with me on so many other things and I love how we were able to expand that score. And then on the live-action movie, we had that great backstory of this little boy named Lin-Manuel Miranda who went to school with my niece, and I would hear about this boy, how he always loved the Little Mermaid so much and so years go by, and Lin is a worldwide phenomenon…

LM: How did you collaborate with Lin-Manuel?  Before I even watched the movie, I was wondering how your style of music and Lin-Manuel’s approach would go together.

AM: Well, the characters have a rap moment in Scuttlebutt. (laughs) That was a lot of fun. As I’ve mentioned previously, Lin loved the movie, he is a wonderful collaborator and a great person. We had a great time creating this movie, there were areas where a song like for example Wild Uncharted Waters is really in my realm and Lin was like “what do I do with this?” and then obviously Scuttlebutt– I gave him a piece of music and he rapped over it brilliantly – that’s much more his area of expertise. If someone ever asked me to perform this number that would be a great challenge for me… And then there is For the First Time – I think that song is most of the marriage of our two talents. Working with Rob Marshall was fantastic, Rob comes out of theatre, he is a great film director – it was an amazing experience. But still, at the end of the day, the original Little Mermaid has that innocence and that original spark, and you can never compete with that.

 

Some scenes are practically no different, for example, the performance of Ariel’s famous song about how she wants to stay in the world of people – Part of Your World. Individual scenarios and visual details make the relationships of the main characters more touching, transform the image of Prince Eric making it deeper and more complete. But, in general, the authors failed to do the main thing – to convey the most beautiful colorful, and magical atmosphere from the animated film. The Little Mermaid (Halle Bailey) exists against the background of computer-generated creatures from the underwater world. The feeling of “fabulousness” disappears, and the desire to re-watch the film does not arise.

The ability to create the music of magical worlds – is a rare gift. How does the composer envision those worlds?

 

LM: Do you create a musical world specific for each show?

AM: Yes. And if you can’t create that special world – chances are it’s not going to be a successful musical. With music – you want to create an homage to something bigger. Aladdin – is all about being an homage to the Hollywood view of the mysterious East, Beauty is an homage to classic Walt Disney and Mermaid – is all about that Caribbean world, that sense of the water world and sensibility.

LM: What are you working on now?

AM: I have a project in the works – a musical based on the movie Night at the Museum. I’ve been working on a Nancy Drew musical as well. You know, you work on the projects and guide them forward and sometimes you need to put them aside or things fall into place and the show is getting produced. You never know what’s going to happen.

 

We congratulate Alan Menken on his 75th birthday and wish him to create many more fabulous worlds, detective adventures, or melodramas filling them with magical music that will never go “out of style” because it is written by a maestro with a big heart that knows what Love, Kindness and Compassion are.