Word: menken
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...singing about. Of all the fine scores Alan Menken has composed for Disney animated features (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin), this is the most complex and rhapsodic, full of swelling passages that are artfully complemented by the Disney artists' imagery of pristine streams and forests. Menken's lyricist, Stephen Schwartz of Broadway's Godspell and Pippin, has a poetic righteousness that deftly avoids propaganda. Colors of the Wind -- among the loveliest ballads composed for a Disney cartoon, and sung to fierce perfection by Judy Kuhn -- ends with the admonition, "You can own the earth, and still...
...different." This Christmas Carol grafts part of Dickens' biography (his days as a child laborer, his father's trip to debtors' prison) onto Scrooge. It makes him less a villain than a victim of his times. "Scrooge is really every one of us," notes the show's composer, Alan Menken. "We all have a tendency to watch out for our interests and to avoid taking responsibility for the fate of the world...
...that it's big and pretty -- holiday candy for the whole family at $19 to $55 a ticket. It was confected by Broadway's top talent, including set designer Tony Walton, costume designer William Ivey Long, choreographer Susan Stroman and lyricist Lynn Ahrens. Some are working at half speed. Menken's melodies are less inventive than his scores for the Disney cartoons The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. He gets a B+ for hummable ballads and ho-humbuggable comic turns. Stroman's jazziest ideas are reprises of her dancing-on-furniture number from Crazy for You. Ahrens' lyrics...
...show is playing 85 times through Jan. 1, with as many as four shows a day. Even so, with a cast of 90 and devilishly elaborate special effects, this very Menken Christmas Carol won't break even for a few years. The producers hope to make it a holiday tradition in New York and other cities. "It's a story that has lasted 150 years," says Ockrent, "and I don't see why it shouldn't last another 150. Hopefully at the Paramount...
...heart, though, Aladdin and its kin were the merest, dearest emotional travelogues. They alighted on a dream here, a resentment there; they poked at a feeling until it sang a perky or rhapsodic Alan Menken tune. Nothing was lacking in these terrific movies, but something was missing: primal anguish, the kind that made children wet the seats of movie palaces more than a half- century ago as they watched Snow White succumb to the poison apple or Bambi's mother die from a hunter's shotgun blast. Disney cartoons were often the first films kids saw and the first that...