Alan Menken on ‘The Little Mermaid’ and the Mixed Blessing of Disney Fame

Yeah, sort of. [Laughs] After some time, you are feeling like a workaholic.

Do you get pleasure from revisiting your older work, or do you achieve this extra out of a way of protectiveness?

Just a little of each. These are my infants — I don’t need to stroll away from them. Sometimes I’ll assume, “What more do we have to say in the telling of this story?” And then it is going to be incumbent upon me to get to know the director, the e-book author, and discuss to them concerning the issues they need to add. That’s the place it turns into enjoyable for me.

What was it like working with Lin-Manuel Miranda on new songs for “The Little Mermaid”?

It was a whole lot of enjoyable — I knew about him as a result of he went to the [Hunter College Elementary School] with my niece, and I’d at all times hear about this little boy, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and the way he was obsessive about “The Little Mermaid.”

Of the three songs we did collectively, one is extra in my and Howard’s wheelhouse, “Wild Uncharted Waters.” It’s a ballad sung by Prince Eric, and it’s the roiling inside him — it’s very emotional. “For the First Time,” which Ariel sings when she will get legs about all of the issues she’s noticing for the primary time, is an actual mixture of our types. I had given Lin a fraction from the rating from the unique animated film, and he mentioned, “Wait, can we put a 2 against the 3?” [referring to the tempo], and so it obtained that actual rhythmic rub to it. And the one which was far more in Lin’s wheelhouse was “The Scuttlebutt,” which is sung by Scuttle and Sebastian [played by Awkwafina and Daveed Diggs]. I gave him somewhat Caribbean tune considering he would lyricize that, and actually, he rapped over it! It was simply a kind of moments the place you sense any person’s brilliance.

In 1997, David Horn, now the manager producer of PBS’s “Great Performances” sequence, informed The New York Times, “When there’s a Sondheim musical, everyone refers to it as a Sondheim musical. When it’s something Alan has done, they refer to it as a Disney musical.” Do you continue to thoughts your exhibits being often known as Disney musicals?

I typically would have somewhat resistance to easily being characterised as “Disney composer Alan Menken” as a result of I already had an enormous hit with “Little Shop of Horrors” earlier than I went to Disney. And whereas I used to be at Disney, I wrote so many different exterior tasks — the “Christmas Carol” that was at Madison Square Garden for [nearly] 10 years with Lynn Ahrens, [stage shows] “Sister Act,” “A Bronx Tale,” “Leap of Faith,” [the series] “Galavant” — however there is no such thing as a musical alternative that’s on the stage of writing a musical for Disney. If you do your work proper, you should have an expertise that nothing else can match.