You wouldn’t clock Alan Menken on the street. The composer – spiky grey hair, crinkled forehead, encouraging grin – is altogether unassuming. To see his oeuvre, though, is to realise this 75-year-old soundtracked your childhood. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas – the man is almost more Disney than Walt himself. With eight Oscars, Menken has more golden statuettes than anyone else alive. Plus 11 Grammys, an Emmy, and a Tony. Meryl Streep, eat your heart out.
“If I showed up at the Oscars now, the car would pull up in front of all these photographers, the door would open, I’d walk out and they’d go, ‘Oh…” Menken laughs.
We’re speaking at the Marylebone Hotel off the back of Menken’s two sold-out shows at the London Palladium – his first ever solo concerts in the UK. The setlist branches across his repertoire of Disney hits to a medley of songs from his Tony-winning Broadway show Newsies. Simultaneously, he’s prepping for a musical adaptation of 1997’s Hercules, which lands today (6 June) in the West End for a seven-month run. He’s exhausted, he admits: “I’m singing the songs and telling the stories behind them. So, I want to be emotionally and mentally present. You’re doing it twice in a row, and the concerts are about two and a half hours each.”
Menken is most comfortable behind the piano. The hidden genius responsible for little mermaid Ariel’s siren song “Part of Your World” and Pocahontas’s paean to nature “Colours of the Wind”, it’s ironic that he had wanted to be a performer. “Really, I wanted to be a singer-songwriter like Billy Joel, Elton John or Jackson Browne,” he says. After school, to appease his family of doctors, he enrolled in pre-med at NYU. It didn’t last long, though, and he drifted from anthropology to philosophy before eventually graduating with a degree in musicology. He then enrolled in the legendary composer Lehman Engel’s Tony-winning BMI Musical Theatre Workshop. It was there he learnt his craft, making a living penning jingles, writing songs for Sesame Street and playing his early material in clubs to keep him and his wife Janis Menken, whom he married at 23, afloat.
“And then, finally, along the way, I met Howard Ashman,” Menken says of his much-loved collaborator and lyricist, who died in 1991 from Aids, aged 40. Ashman, with whom Menken later teamed up for The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, invited the composer and his teacher Engel to write the music for his 1978 adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, which led to a second project adapting Roger Corman’s 1960 film Little Shop of Horrors into an off-Broadway hit.
When Disney came knocking, Menken had never scored a film before. “I remember our first recording session … It was the first time I’d ever had an orchestra play my work,” he says. For their initial meeting, Menken had been tasked with scoring the magical opening scene of The Little Mermaid, in which Ariel surfaces from the ocean and spots Prince Eric’s ship. He watched nervously as the producers discussed his work from a distance. “In my mind, they’re saying, ‘How do we tell him this is awful? We’ve got to get rid of him. It’s just terrible’,” he says. In reality, they had just one note: to add a “whoop”-like accent to the score when Ariel pops up on the rock.
Ashman and Menken soon found the fun amid the fear of failure. They bestowed upon Ursula the Sea Witch, the story’s cunning villain based on the Seventies drag queen Divine, a big sultry number (“Poor Unfortunate Souls”) to seduce Ariel into swapping her voice for legs and love. They handed Trinidadian crab Sebastian a calypso-style plea (“Under the Sea”) to persuade Ariel to stay in Atlantica. “You want to find a dramaturgical device that makes it entertaining and interesting,” Menken explains of his process. “A musical motif to follow the vocabulary.”
The Little Mermaid was the start of the so-called Disney Renaissance, a period from 1989 to 1999, during which the conglomerate produced a run of commercially successful and critically acclaimed films. Of the 10 Disney hits made in that era, Menken worked on six. “I won the first Oscar for the score for Little Mermaid,” Menken says. It was that same night in 1990 that Ashman told Menken he was terminally ill.
“He was suffering. He had Aids and he was hiding it,” Menken says. Ashman died a year later, on 14 March 1991. “Howard never saw Beauty and the Beast completed. He never saw Aladdin completed,” Menken says, looking down at his hands and fighting the tears welling in his eyes. On how he carries on without Ashman, Menken says simply: “He’s with me.”
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“It’s the underpinning of all of this – this other story. He wasn’t telling anyone he had Aids because of the stigma. He thought he was going to be blackballed. As it turned out, to their credit, that was not the way Disney acted at all. They were wonderful.”
Shortly after Ashman’s death, Menken was introduced to Tim Rice, the songwriter behind Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, with whom he completed Aladdin. “I was thinking, ‘What’s gonna happen? Howard’s not here. Is everything gonna go off the rails?’” recalls Menken. With Ashman in their minds and in their hearts, the pair sat down and penned “A Whole New World” – an iconic love song about broadening horizons through unguarded romance.
If the early Nineties were the Disney Renaissance, we’re now in the industrial revolution. Live-action remakes of the classics are mass-manufactured and churned out on a year-to-six-monthly basis, with Snow White and Lilo & Stitch the latest to suffer the critically disparaged blow. So far, Menken’s The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin have all received the live-action treatment.
“The director is the dominant force,” says Menken, who sees the remake process as a “dance” between understanding someone’s new vision and standing his ground. “You don’t want me being the keeper of the flame, telling them what they can or can’t do.”
Some projects were easier than others. Bill Condon, who directed 2017’s Beauty and the Beast starring Emma Watson as the bookish Belle, was a musical theatre fan who had a fairly straight adaptation in mind. Likewise, Robert Marshall, who directed the film adaptation of Broadway’s Chicago, followed a similar approach on The Little Mermaid. It was Guy Ritchie, with his action-packed approach to 2019’s Aladdin, who truly rocked the boat.
“I don’t know this guy,” Menken recalls thinking of the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels director. “I mean, he’s very smart. But I don’t think he’s a creature of musical theatre particularly,” he adds, correctly. Ritchie is, after all, best known for British gangster features. “He really wanted to give it a pop edge, which was fine. But we had to find this marriage of where he’s coming from, where I’m coming from, and walk towards each other until you find a sweet spot, which we did.”
Creative clashes aside, Disney’s live-action remakes have faced an increased level of cultural backlash. In 2023, the actor and singer Halle Bailey was met with racist attacks online after she was cast as Ariel. “I thought she was a wonderful choice,” says Menken. “I think it cost us a lot at the box office, but that’s not my area of knowledge.” It wasn’t his first taste of controversy, however. Years earlier, fans of Beauty and the Beast were left disappointed after a scene that had been teased as LeFou’s “exclusively gay moment” transpired to be a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of him dancing with a man.
“He’s a character. He’s just a nerdy guy who has hero worship,” says Menken of LeFou’s relationship with brawny himbo Gaston. “Howard would be appalled, frankly,” he adds of the sexuality debate. “And he was a gay man.”
Still, Menken plans to ride the Disney rollercoaster through many more loops with Hercules next up. The musical, directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, with whom Menken worked on the Tony-nominated Broadway adaptation of Aladdin, promises to be a “wise-cracking, column-shaking, underworld-rocking ride of adventure and self-discovery” as the titular son of Zeus tries to prove himself worthy of Mount Olympus.
It’s a project Menken has wanted to launch for decades. “There’s so much style,” he says. “David Zippel’s lyrics are so clever. You want to meet audience expectations and expand them.” Regardless of Menken’s prerequisite nerves, the story and its characters are so evidently hit musical material: Hades, the wisecracking god of the underworld, is wonderfully cutting and camp, a villain destined for the stage.
Still, Menken says that the preview performances, due to run until 23 June, will be the ultimate litmus test of the show’s success. “Musicals are collaborative,” he says. “The last collaborator, especially with a stage musical, is the audience. They are talking to you. You’re learning from them and it’s… whoa.”
Despite nearly five decades in the business, Menken remains wide-eyed about the magic of his work – and entirely uninterested in giving it up. “I love the medium. I feel like I owe it to my gifts to use them,” he says. “I’ve been doing this for so long that I don’t really have hobbies.” What happens when the music stops is a topic that frequently comes up for Menken in therapy, something he has been doing for the last 50 years. Specifically, he worries about what would happen to his team if he ever chose to retire. And so for now, that is off the table. He will, he says, continue to compose until his talent falters: “Then, I hope somebody will hit me over the head and tell me to stop.”
‘Hercules’ is playing at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London until 28 March 2026
