In early 1991, the composer Alan Menken took a keyboard to St Vincent’s hospital in New York to visit his friend and creative partner, the lyricist Howard Ashman. Ashman was in the final stages of Aids-related illness, but was determined to finish his work on Disney’s Aladdin. Together, they knocked out the music and lyrics for Prince Ali – one of the movie’s most joyous numbers – as Ashman lay in bed.
Menken and Ashman had already collaborated on Disney’s hit 1989 animated musical The Little Mermaid; in the winter of 1991, they were putting the finishing touches on Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast simultaneously. Ashman was “fighting for his life” while they were working on all three, Menken recalls from his home studio in upstate New York. At first, he had no idea his friend was sick, let alone battling HIV; Ashman only revealed his diagnosis after they won the Oscar for best original song for Under the Sea in 1990.
“For a while he was absolutely convinced that if it got beyond a very small circle of people, his career would be over,” Menken says.
Ashman died before Aladdin was completed. He didn’t witness the movie’s astounding success, topping the US box office in 1992, and he wasn’t there to accept his Oscar for best original song for Beauty and the Beast at the Academy Awards that year, or see Menken accept his own for best score.
Menken shares this bittersweet story at the top of his live autobiographical solo show, A Whole New World of Alan Menken, making its Australian debut in May after performances in the US, UK and Japan. Alternating between storytelling and musical interludes with Menken on piano, and using photos and behind-the-scenes footage, the show pulls back the curtain on how songs are made – drawing on his vast Disney oeuvre as well as Broadway hits such as Little Shop of Horrors and Sister Act.
Menken’s accolades include eight Academy Awards (the equal most won by a living person) and 11 Grammys; in fact, he’s an Egot – a rare winner of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards. But, as he says with good humour, he’s really a Regot. “The R is the Razzie for worst song of the year for a song from the Newsies movie, which was a huge flop,” he tells me. Two decades later, he won a Tony for the Newsies stage production: “It’s an example of how material just evolves on its own, over time.”
Menken’s career as a composer might be considered improbable. “All the men in my family were dentists,” he says. But his dad was a piano-playing dentist who liked Fats Waller, and his mum was an actor, dancer and playwright before having children. Both loved musicals, and so Menken grew up hearing them in their New York home.
As a child he took piano lessons and learned the classical canon, but preferred composing his own tunes. As a teen he learned guitar and became obsessed with the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. “Music was everything to me,” he says.
Menken’s omnivorous taste is felt throughout his oeuvre – from the influence of Joni Mitchell on Tangled to the homage to 70s disco in Sister Act. Other parts of his life found their way into the work, too: his 1982 horror comedy Little Shop of Horrors, created with Ashman, features a sadistic dentist who laughs himself to death on nitrous oxide, a substance Menken’s father championed. (His father appreciated the joke.)
Little Shop and its success was key in landing Ashman and Menken their big break at Disney. The studio was under new management and on a mission to revitalise its animation division. “Everyone who came in had some relationship to theatre or musicals – including [CEO Michael] Eisner, who was a theatre major in college – and it was this amazing new beginning,” Menken says.
Menken and Ashman brought in Broadway-trained singers to play key roles and infused their soundtracks with the musical theatre canon, including the Weimar cabaret of Kurt Weill and the French music hall stylings of Maurice Chevalier.
Most importantly, they brought Broadway’s integrated approach to musical storytelling to Disney’s scripts, insisting that every song reveal plot or character. Their work was integral to the so-called “Disney Renaissance”, and had a huge and lasting influence on stage and screen musicals. Since Ashman’s death, Menken has written the score for many Disney films including Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Enchanted and Tangled, among others.
Menken approaches new projects the same way he did back then. “We’re not going to start writing until we figure out what’s the story, and will it make a good musical. How do we structure it? Where would the songs go? What would the musical world of this story be? You can talk for weeks about the entire picture – you want to feel it in detail before you allow the muse to emerge.”
In recent years, he’s revisited many of his scores for Disney’s stage and live action adaptations, including the West End version of Hercules and the 2023 remake of the Little Mermaid, collaborating with Lin-Manuel Miranda on new tracks.
“On the one hand, you’re the keeper of the flame, but you’re also a member of a new team that’s going to reinterpret the material,” Menken says. “You’ve to be flexible; be patient. Patience is not one of my strong suits. I’m an ADHD kind of person and I just want to go. I write fast.”
Among his current works-in-progress are adaptations of Night at the Museum and Nancy Drew – and a lesser-known rock musical that he started work on in the early 1980s. Titled Atina: Evil Queen of the Galaxy and billed as the story of a “sadomasochistic bitch queen from hell”, it was originally conceived as a vehicle for the drag queen Divine. Menken chuckles when I ask him about it: “Atina’s filthy.”
Making a musical is harder than ever, he says. “The talent is there, but musicals, especially in New York, have gotten incredibly expensive.” Looking back at works like Newsies gives him a certain optimism: “I do feel like, over time, if it’s good enough, it’ll find its life.”
• A Whole New World of Alan Menken is at the Palais Theatre, Melbourne on 6 May and Sydney Event Centre on 8 May
