Alan Menken appears on screen, a digital piano just visible behind him. He plays a few bars – he likes to tinkle while talking – and jokes, “Before I even get out of bed, I lean over to find a piano ... and I am playing” – he sings the next part – “‘Good morning, Alan!’”
Growing up in New York in a family of dentists, the piano was always an instrument of communication for Menken. “My dad loved playing boogie woogie – the Great American Songbook – and I would sit beside him and plink out the melody line as he played the chords.
“I was a very ADHD kind of kid: I couldn’t concentrate, wasn’t good with complicated narrative or memorising facts. What I wanted was the broad emotional theme that music provided for me. Mostly, people born with this kind of music thing, they find their mode of communication comes through music.”
Menken’s may not be a name you recognise immediately, but you can probably sing along with at least one of his songs. With his creative partner, Howard Ashman, the composer was a key driver in the Disney renaissance of the early 1990s. The animation studio had gone into decline in the 1960s, after the deaths of Walt and Roy O Disney.
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Then, over four remarkable years, Menken and Ashman’s collaboration on the scores for The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin (1992, with Tim Rice) earned the composer and lyricist three Academy Awards for best song.
Those Oscar-winning tunes – Under the Sea, Beauty and the Beast, and A Whole New World – became anthems for a generation of children; the more recent live-action remakes of each of the films has ensured their longevity with a new generation of screenagers.
Asked if he can pick a personal anthem from his own catalogue, however, and Menken is stumped. “People would probably think I would choose something like Proud of Your Boy,” he says, referring to the tender tenor solo that Aladdin sings in honour of his mother in the musical’s stage adaptation. (It was cut from the animated film in the final edits.)
“The great joy of writing for musical theatre is to be able to create a world through music – to set the time, place, tone, attitude, the essence of a character through music. Proud of Your Boy sounds like a very personal song, but it isn’t mine; it is Aladdin’s.
“That’s the thing: when you are writing for theatre or film, you are writing specifically for a character or a character’s situation. If you do it well, you create an emotional connection. But [Proud of Your Boy]: that is not my emotion. The amazing thing, I think, is that it is not tied to what I am feeling.
“In general I am a bit of a chameleon. The song I first became known for” – Under the Sea, from The Little Mermaid – “was a calypso song. Did I grow up in the Caribbean? No, but part of me absorbs the songs and style and world of [whatever] genre [I am working in], and it comes out through the filter that is Alan Menken.”
The composer’s real trick, he says, has been “to avoid having a signature sound”. The ultimate goal as he approaches each score is “to serve something bigger than me”.
All that said, Menken admits that he has “a very strong emotional connection to any song that I wrote with Howard”. Ashman died of Aids in 1991, at the age of 40. Even after more than 30 years, “I miss him deeply.”
Menken and Ashman first collaborated in 1979 in an off-Broadway workshop on projects that both succeeded (God Bless You, Mr Rosewater) and failed (Babe!) to get funding for production.
Their breakthrough hit as a composer-lyricist duo was with Little Shop of Horrors. With its pop-rock score and grungy aesthetic, the horror-comedy from 1982 became a cult hit, running for five years at the Orpheum Theatre in Manhattan and becoming the highest-grossing musical in off-Broadway history at the time.
A Broadway transfer was mooted, but the pair resisted offers; like the B-movie that inspired it, and the Skid Row setting, they believed it should be played “where it belonged”, as Menken puts it. “Stylistically it’s deliberately tacky and winky. It is very much an off-Broadway show.”
Little Shop of Horrors set a template for their future collaborations. “What became pivotal for us,” he says, “was that we had a very strong sense of wanting to be very specific to whatever genre [we would use to tell a story]. We called it pastiche. We were doing a pastiche of a style and period to make a comment on the work we were making.”
For Little Shop of Horrors “that was bubblegum rock’n’roll and a Phil Spector-style wall of sound. Music associated with beach-blanket horror movies. We wanted to have that wink, and those smart choices make all the difference. Once you establish your musical vocabulary, the world comes to life.”
Menken and Ashman couldn’t resist the invitation to adapt Little Shop of Horrors for Hollywood, however, and it was worth their while. The 1986 film, directed by Frank Oz, was a popular and critical hit. “This is the kind of movie that cults are made of,” the influential critic Robert Egbert proclaimed. Menken and Ashman earned their first Oscar nomination for a new song written specifically for the film.
Their involvement with Disney followed soon after, although, Menken says, “I will pass the credit to Howard for that one. He was so smart about things like that. I think Howard knew there was a hunger in general in the public for the return of the Disney animated musical, and it was really good timing.”
Ashman was already working with the studio as a lyricist, but he brought Menken on board when he was offered work on The Little Mermaid, which changed the nature of their success.
Menken describes their approach to creating the score for The Little Mermaid as typical of their work together. “We took this classic story, with its timeless context, and gave it a very contemporary voice.” It was inevitable, he says, that the audience would relate to Ariel, the “girl who has everything” except freedom, “in a powerful way”.
It grossed more than $100 million at the box office during its initial run, a record for an animated film, and two of its songs were nominated for Oscars. (They won for Under the Sea.) “The terrible thing is that we were giving birth to something amazing and Howard was dying. He didn’t even live to see most of it.”
Ashman died in the months before Beauty and the Beast was released, in 1991, his work on that film and Aladdin the following year being celebrated posthumously.
Menken is aware that had any of these films been a critical flop, his career might have been very different.
“Even now there’s this business model driving the studios. If they have an unsuccessful musical they will say, ‘Oh, musicals don’t work,’ and will pull them all.”
Still, he believes that “if artists put work out there that is valid artistically, it will always find its audience. Look at Newsies,” he says, referring to the live-action musical film from 1992 that he scored about newspaper boys at the turn of the 20th century, starring a young Christian Bale.
“It was an enormous flop. I won the Razzie award for worst song of the year just as I won an Oscar for best song with Aladdin. Fast-forward to Broadway in 2012 and [the score] won me my first Tony Award.”
Menken has cultivated a philosophical approach to perceived failure, understanding that things can “find their voice over a lot of time. Aladdin went through so many versions before it became the Broadway show, and what happened was so much material that we cut to make the film work – Proud of Your Boy, Aladdin’s sidekicks – ended up being put back in.
“When you put something out there into the world, it may find its home or it may not. It may find it later or it may not. The important thing is to put your failures aside and write something else. You need to always be moving on to write something new.”
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He is currently workshopping a musical based on the Nancy Drew mysteries, as well as tinkering with scores for musical adaptations of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, while live-action and stage versions of Tangled are “working their way towards production”.
Menken doesn’t know yet whether these projects will come to fruition, but he knows his own live show, A Whole New World of Alan Menken – in which he tells the story of his career, sitting at his natural home, on a piano stool – will premiere in Dublin in February.
Given that he has worked in so many collaborative contexts, he says, “there is no place where [all my music] can be in the same place, so it’s really satisfying to have a home for it, even for one night, where I can talk about my work, how it was made, and connect with audiences in a way I wouldn’t otherwise. With songs and musicals there is always the potential for a deep emotional connection.”
That’s what he has been going for all along.
A Whole New World of Alan Menken is at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, on Saturday, February 7th
