from 2010
ALAN MENKEN
talks about "Tangled," and his other Disney work

by Scott Wolf

Composer Alan Menken was a key ingredient to the success of the revival in Disney's animation, beginning with "The Little Mermaid."  From the flashy style of Broadway to the touching, romantic ballads, Alan has written some of Disney's best-loved and best-known songs. It was a particular treat for me to interview Alan. Back in 1992 I had my first date with my wife. "Aladdin" was not yet released, but I was working for Disney, and I had work-in-progress recordings of many of the songs, including "A Whole New World." When we got married a year later, we used that song in our wedding, along with the film's finale version of that song as we were pronounced husband and wife. It was great to meet the man responsible for those memories, and to get the chance to share our conversation with you.

Scott Wolf: I’m so glad you are a part of it “Tangled.” It really has that timeless Disney fairy tale feel to me. What were your inspirations when coming up with the music?

Alan Menken: “Tangled” had been around a long time before I was involved. Anytime someone brings me on to one of these projects they always go, “Do we want Alan Menken or not, because I don’t want this to sound like ‘Beauty and the Beast,’” or “I don’t want this to sound like ‘Enchanted.’” At the same time, I’m a chameleon. So when I got involved, we all thought about how can we give this an original color? Especially because I’ve already written a musical for somebody trapped in a tower, Quasimodo in “Hunchback.” I thought, “What are we going to do, write ‘Out There’ again?” So I said, “Rather than saying she wants to be out there, how about if she sings about how complete she feels in this tower even though we know she needs to get out of this tower.”

In my gut I felt that folk rock would be a great palette for this. Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens. Her long hair reminded me of the 1960s. That seemed to be a really promising palette, the acoustic guitar really plays a heavy role in being a musical color of this movie. And then of course Mother Gothel is a whole other color. Musical theater.

You look at Mother Gothel and you go, “No wonder Disney kills off all the mothers.” Finally we have a mother, and look what she’s like. She’s scary. But yeah, it’s a different color entirely.

For the pub thugs, I was thinking like “Mighty Wind” and that kind of a spoof of the Kingston Trio style, so it’s kind of like “Mighty Wind” set in a medieval dungeon. Glenn Slater’s lyrics are so funny. He’s so talented.

SW: Had you worked together before this?

AM: He and I wrote “Home on the Range” together, we have written “Sister Act,” and we’ve written “Leap of Faith” which is at the Ahmanson now, and we wrote “Little Mermaid” on Broadway, so of course it was Howard (Ashman)’s songs and my songs and then plus.

SW: You’ve written with a lot of lyricists. Does it take time for you to adjust to a new lyricist?

AM: No, the people I work with are experienced theater people, and it’s just a matter of you come together and you give yourself the right song assignment and you break the ice with the first song. Now I have several collaborators that I work with. Stephen Schwartz, Glenn Slater, David Zippel and I are writing some new things together, and of course Tim Rice, Lynn Ahrens, I’ve been working with Chad Beguelin now, and Jack Feldman because we’re doing “Newsies,” a stage musical of “Newsies.”

SW: I love “Newsies!” That’ll be great on stage. What other projects are you currently working on?

AM: “Newsies,” “Hunchback” and “Aladdin” are stage. With “Aladdin,” I’m getting all of the original outtake songs I wrote with Howard Ashman into the stage musical.

SW: I’m familiar with a lot of the outtake songs.

AM: “Call Me Princess” is in there, “How Quick They Forget,” of course “Proud of Your Boy,” “Babkak, Omar, Aladdin, Kassim,” “High Adventure,” “Why Me?” “You Can Count On Me,” the song I wrote for the park (the stage version of “Aladdin” in Disney California Adventure), called “To Be Free,” somehow we were able to fit all of those songs in. I don’t know how we did it, but we’ll have a reading and hope it all holds together.

The original intent was to be almost like a Hope/Crosby “Road” picture, and then the whole story changed, Aladdin’s mother was eliminated.

SW: The original intent of the film?

AM: Yes, originally “Aladdin” was written at the same time as “Mermaid” and then it went back into the development process.

So those three stage things, and there’s “Tangled,” the two new Broadway shows, “Enchanted” and “Leap of Faith,” and an original live action film musical that I’m developing, which is not necessarily Disney, I’m just developing it with a producer here, and David Zippel is the lyricist of that.

SW: Are you involved in “The Little Mermaid” attraction at California Adventure?

AM: I think they just sort of adapted my work. I did the music for a ride I never saw at Tokyo DisneySea which is Sinbad, and I never got to see it yet.

SW: Do you have input or decide where the songs go in the films, such as in “Tangled”?

AM: Yeah, that’s what we do. We get together with the directors, or in this case with Dan Fogelman the writer, and say, “Well, how do we structure this?” and the structure of this remained extremely fluid all the way up to a couple months ago even. It’s been a struggle getting this, because it’s a real balance, it’s not a traditional break-into-song musical, but it has musical theater type moments, and break-into-song moments within an action adventure romance. So it’s a real hybrid.

SW: Speaking of the musical theater, I still remember the first time I saw “Little Mermaid” and “Under the Sea” came on, and the entire audience broke into applause which I had never seen in a movie. It was like being at a Broadway show. Was it a big decision to bring that type of music into an animated feature?

AM: Frankly, the classic Disney animated musicals always were in the form of the musicals of the day. In some cases, they were like operetta, but they were very much influenced by the musicals of the day, if you look at things like “Lady and the Tramp.” Howard and I did what we do. We knew that we wanted to create a big over-the-top production number. That’s what we do. Why not go for it? And (directors) John (Musker) and Ron (Clements) love musical theater.

SW: Do you have any favorite memories from all of your work with Disney?

AM: There’s so many, but I remember when we went in and they were re-releasing “Aladdin” (on DVD) and we went in and did “Proud of Your Boy” with a full orchestra. It only existed as a piano vocal demo for like fifteen years, and then Danny Troob came back to do the orchestration and Clay Aiken came in and they started playing this song. You could feel it, it felt right out of what we had done for “Aladdin,” I was just emotionally blown away.

Oh! The day we had Angela Lansbury and Jerry Orbach in the RCA studios in New York recording both “Be Our Guest” and “Beauty and the Beast.” Angela recorded “Beauty and the Beast” in one take. That’s what we ended up using. It was perfect. It was incredible!

A lot of good memories.

Mandy Moore talks about her role as the voice of Rapunzel in"Tangled"
Zachary Levi talks about his role as the voice of Flynn Rider in "Tangled"

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