The First Act

Just nominated
for a Best Original Song Golden Globe Award for his work
on Enchanted, eight-time Academy Award–winning
composer Alan Menken is best known for his
collaborations with lyricist Howard Ashman, who
succumbed to AIDS in 1991 after
completing Aladdin and Beauty and the
Beast. As the stage version of The Little
Mermaid prepares to open January 10 at Broadway’s
Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, Menken told Advocate.com how
he’s floated on without his beloved friend.

I recently heard you sing selections from The
Little Mermaid for an intimate press audience.
Do you enjoy performing your own compositions?

I like it. I used
to do it a lot more. I actually have to rehearse
because I know that I can’t dance through them,
especially now that most people know my songs better
than I do.

You’ve written new songs and extended others for
the stage version of The Little Mermaid. What was
the biggest challenge for you in bringing it to Broadway?

The biggest
challenge for me was not as big as it was for everybody
else. Physically bringing The Little Mermaid to
the stage was the biggest challenge. It was very
natural and very clear where the new songs needed to
go. The biggest challenge, I guess, was finding a way to
deepen the characters of Prince Eric and [King]
Triton, and really nail that emotional arc that runs
through the show in a way that gives it more context
and substance, and gives a greater depth to the score.

Was it difficult to revisit these characters after
almost 20 years?

This is something
I’ve done many times before, but obviously, doing
something without Howard is very different than doing
something with Howard. I went through that first on
Aladdin, and I went through it on
Broadway’s Beauty and the Beast, and now
I’ve gone through it on Mermaid. So
I’m certainly used to it. Getting back into the
heads of the characters was not hard for me, but another
challenge is making room for other people to claim
authorial ownership of these characters as well.

Did it feel odd to retool Howard’s and your songs
with lyricist Glenn Slater?

It wasn’t
terribly odd. Again, it’s something I’m very
used to. And I always felt that Glenn was a good match
for Howard, that he had a similar, wicked, slightly
cruel sense of humor. He’s similarly hip. He’s
a different person than Howard, and I would never want to
even attempt to re-create the soul of Howard. But the
souls of the characters, as interpreted through Glenn,
are very compatible with those interpreted through
Howard.

How did you deal with Howard’s passing?

It was about a
year of passing, so to speak, because back in those days
we assumed that AIDS was a death sentence. Howard knew all
the way back when we were just starting Little
Mermaid, when the Little Shop [of Horrors]
movie was coming out, but none of us knew until five years
later. He did so much with that shadow hanging over him. In
terms of Mermaid, what was hanging over us was
between the lines and maybe on a subconscious level,
but I did not know. When he finally told me, right
after the Academy Awards for The Little Mermaid, in
one way it was sad, traumatizing, and frightening. In
another way, it cleared things up. It was very
important to him to maintain secrecy all throughout us
working on Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin,
and he passed away not knowing that there were going to be
major changes in Aladdin. They didn’t
want to come to him and tell him, “We’re
cutting the character of the mother, we’re cutting
the sidekicks, and all these different changes are
going to be happening.” And he passed away
thinking that Beauty was not going to be
successful—he thought, No, it’s wrong,
it’s not working. But that was his general nature. He
was very much a problem solver and often—I hate
to say it—a glass-half-empty guy. But he
created some of the greatest full glasses for all of us out
of all that.