Word: menken
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Despite all the cautionary tales, they keep coming. Disney, last year's disastrous Newsies notwithstanding, seems on the verge of turning its hegemonic attentions to live-action musicals: the studio has the splendid composer Danny Elfman (The Simpsons, Tim Burton's films) and Alan Menken, & Newsies' composer, each developing a new live-action movie musical, plus Oliver Stone in preproduction on Evita...
...creator of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin for Disney, Menken has almost single-handedly revived the movie musical, albeit in cartoon form. And with the success of Disney's giddy, macabre new animated musical The Nightmare Before Christmas (it is the most popular movie in America right now), we are in a new golden era: Disney is to the '90s what MGM was to the '50s. "We came in with real respect for the established traditions of the American musical," Menken says of his blockbuster cartoon movies. Except, of course, for the tradition of filming actors...
...filmmakers, and it seems axiomatic that if some new species of live-action long-form musical is to evolve, it will owe at least as much to R.E.M.'s video Everybody Hurts, say, as to Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis. A big problem with Newsies, admits Menken, was that "it didn't resemble a video enough. There weren't enough camera angles...
...Philip Kunhardt Jr., a former managing editor of LIFE magazine, and his two sons Peter and Philip III -- have drawn on famous Mathew Brady portraits, as well as an extraordinary collection of Lincoln photos assembled by the elder Kunhardt's grandfather, Frederick Hill Meserve. There is music by Alan Menken (Aladdin), narration by James Earl Jones and readings by a stellar cast of Hollywood celebrities as the voices of the principals. All of them paying tribute to the most sainted figure in American history. How could it miss...
...Howard Ashman and Alan Menken...