July 22 - Alan Menken

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On this day, in 1949, Alan Irwin Menken was born in New York, New York. The son of an actress and a piano playing dentist, Alan showed an aptitude for music at an early age. He learned to play the piano and the violin before moving right on into composing. By the age of nine, his original works were receiving Superior scores from the judges of the New York Federation of Music Clubs Junior Composers Contest. Alan graduated from New Rochelle High School in 1967 and moved on to New York University. He enrolled as a pre-med student, a nod to dear old dad, but graduated in 1971 with a degree in Musicology. From there, his plans went in one of two directions. He was either going to be a composer or a rock star. He got to have his cake and eat it too by becoming a rock star of composing.

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Shortly after his college graduation, Alan joined a musical theater workshop sponsored by Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI). He continued to participate in BMI workshops over the next several years, writing songs for potential musicals and then performing them around town in clubs like The Ballroom and Tramps. To make money during this period, he wrote jingles, accompanied ballet troupes, wrote songs for Sesame Street and was a vocal coach. In 1979, Alan would earn some modest success when he teamed up with an up an coming playwright, Howard Ashman, to create a musical adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. The show got great reviews but not so great box office receipts. It didn’t matter. The two men worked well together and were destined for bigger things.

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In 1982, Alan and Howard’s next collaboration opened just off-Broadway at the WPA Theater. Based on a 1960 dark comedy film by Roger Corman, Little Shop of Horrors got rave reviews and soon moved to the Orpheum Theater where it ran for five years, smashing the box office record for an off-Broadway production. In 1986, a hit movie version was released starring Rick Moranis and Ellen Greene, and earned Alan and Howard their first Oscar nomination. The success of Little Shop brought the duo the attention of producers at the Walt Disney Studios who were looking for the right people to turn their next animated film into a musical.

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The mission that Disney Alan and Howard in 1987 was a simple one: after years of the company’s animation product being subpar, they needed to help create a Disney musical that could stand up to comparison with Snow White or Cinderella. No pressure though. I’ve read stories about the song writing duo holing up with nothing more than a synthesizer, in one of those buildings in New York where every floor is just dozens of tiny recording studios lined up in a row. Every time the door to their studio opened, the music that spilled out into the hall caused other doors to other studios to open as everyone wanted to know what was going on in there. And that was before a full orchestra and talents of Jodi Benson, Pat Carroll and Samuel E. Wright were added. Needless to say, Alan and Howard did good. The Little Mermaid became the company’s first smash hit in years, due in no small part to its soundtrack. When awards time came around, the boys would earn an Oscar for Best Song (Under the Sea) while Alan picked up a second one for Best Score. The Disney Renaissance had begun and Alan was going to provide a pretty big chunk of the music for it.

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Alan and Howard rolled right on into their next project, another classic fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast. You might have thought it would be hard for them to top their work in Mermaid, but they did. Their deft blending of romance and humor, spectacle and intimacy pushed Disney’s 30^th animated feature to a place cartoons had never been before: a nomination for the Best Picture Oscar. The boys also picked up not one but three nominations (and the win) for Best Song (Beauty and the Beast edged out Belle and Be Our Guest) while Alan again received the statue for Best Score. The ceremony would have been a magical evening of true celebration centering on Alan and Howard’s talents except for one thing. Howard wasn’t there to share in it.

During production on Mermaid, Howard had revealed to Alan that he’d been diagnosed as HIV+. As work progressed on Beast, so did Howard’s illness. Part way through production, meetings began to be held at Howard’s home and animators would be shocked as to how quickly AIDS was ravaging his body between sessions. Howard continued to work though, writing and rewriting songs and coaxing better performances out of Paige O’Hara and Robbie Benson, right up to the end of his life. Beast had its first screening for the press on March 10, 1991. Producer Don Hahn visited a barely alive Howard in the hospital to tell him about the incredibly enthusiastic reception. Four days later, he died.

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Work had already begun on the duo’s follow-up to Beast, Aladdin, when Howard passed away. Alan needed a new lyricist to work with (notes were his thing, not words) and he brought in the award winning Tim Rice to finish the songs for the film. Alan again picked up two Oscars that year, Best Song with Tim for A Whole New World and Best Score on his own. It should be noted that A Whole New World also won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year, the only time a Disney song has managed to do that.

Following Aladdin, Alan has collaborated with a number of lyricists, none of whom can hold a candle to Howard in my opinion but all successful none the less. He teamed with Jack Feldman for Newsies, Stephen Schwartz for Pocahontas (picking up two more Oscars), Stephen again for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, David Zippel for Hercules, which was a bit of a throwback to his Little Shop days (not only musically but because he and David had worked together back then, too), Glen Slater for Home on the Range and Tangled and Stephen once again for Enchanted. Alan has also scored some non musical films for Disney as well including Touchstone Pictures' Life With Mikey and the 2006 remake of The Shaggy Dog.

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In recent years, Alan has been quite busy revisiting old projects and adding new material to them. For the Broadway stage he's helped bolster Beauty and the Beast, Newsies, Aladdin and The Little Mermaid. A stage version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame became the longest running show ever in Berlin, Germany. Alan has also been (for better or worse; don't get me started) part of the teams that have been turning classic Disney animated films into live action movies. He revised old songs and wrote new ones for the live versions of Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin.

Outside of Disney (does that even exist anymore?), Alan has written music for a number of shows, several of which have had Broadway runs. His version of A Christmas Carol premiered in 1994 and became an annual event at Madison Square Garden for a decade. He's also written adaptations of Sister Act, A Bronx Tale and Leap of Faith. He is reportedly working on a stage version of Corrina, Corrina and had a reading of a new piece in collaboration with Jack Feldman and Harvey Fierstein called Greetings from Niagra Falls, but that production seems to have stalled.

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For basically writing everything everyone wants to put on their modern Disney playlist, Alan was declared an official Disney Legend in 2001. Not that he's done composing for the company by a long shot. He's currently working with Lin-Manuel Miranda on new music for the live action version of The Little Mermaid. And there's persistent rumors about a sequel to Enchanted (but don't hold your breath on that one). Alan is already at the top of the list of Living People with the Most Oscars with eight, but he's tied for third on the list of all time winners. I wouldn't be surprised if he pulls a couple more out of his little hat as time goes on here. Until then, we send good vibes Alan's way and wish him a happy 70th Birthday!

June 21 - The Hunchback of Notre Dame

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On this day, in 1996, Walt Disney Pictures widely released its 34^th animated feature The Hunchback of Notre Dame, two days after its world premiere at the New Orleans Superdome. The idea for adapting Victor Hugo’s epic novel came in 1993 to David Stainton, one of Disney’s development executives, after reading one of those Illustrated Classic comic book versions (feel free to insert your own jokes here about the reading levels of corporate clowns, but it was actually David’s job to read that kind of stuff looking for new material to mine). Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, who had co-directed Beauty and the Beast a couple years prior, were struggling to put together an adaptation of the Greek myth Orpheus when Jeffrey Katzenberg assigned them to helm Hunchback. It didn’t take Gary and Kirk long to get excited about the project while at the same time they quickly realized that many of the books dark themes were going to have to be toned way, way down in order to get a G rating.

So Gary and Kirk went to work. Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz came on board to do the music and also to help shape the story. A whole bunch of characters were shown the door. A few new ones were introduced, specifically Quasimodo’s gargoyle friends. The ending was made a lot (and I mean a lot) happier. In the book, literally everyone but Phoebus dies, although Hugo does quip that the soldier doesn’t get off scot free because he ends up getting married (you can see why Hugo is known for drama and not comedy). And in the end, Hunchback did get its G rating but it is still one of the, if not the, darkest Disney animated films ever made (Frollo sniffing Esmerelda’s hair, anyone?).

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At its release, Hunchback received mostly positive reviews and its fair share of controversy. To date, it is the only Disney animated film to overtly take on the issue of religion, which it did with mixed signals. On the one hand, the only actual religious figure in the film, the Archdeacon played by David Ogden Stiers, is weak, doesn’t offer much spiritual guidance other than to vaguely hint at God and presents the official church as mostly ineffective at actually helping people (although he does keep Frollo from committing infanticide at the beginning, day to day nurturing seems to overwhelm him). On the other hand, God Help the Outcasts clearly denounces religious hypocrites and, in the end, it’s strongly suggested that God himself kills Frollo when the cathedral itself causes him to fall to his death. Needless to say, there are obvious reasons Disney hasn’t touched religious material since then.

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The Hunchback of Notre Dame earned an Oscar nomination for its score, ten Annie Award nominations and numerous other award nominations. It won a Satellite Award for best Animated Film, two Golden Reel Awards for editing and a BMI Film Music Award for Alan Menken. The movie would later be adapted into a stage musical that only played in Berlin, Germany. But that wasn’t the only stage version that came out of the deal, which leads us to the second part of today’s post.

Also on this day, also in 1996, The Hunchback of Notre Dame – A Musical Adventure debuted at the Disney-MGM Studios in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. Considered by many guests (and cast members) to be one of the best productions to ever grace a Disney theme park stage, the Hunchback show opened to coincide with the release of the film. Closely following and condensing the plot of the movie (the only songs not included were Hellfire and The Court of Miracles, for obvious and logistic reasons respectively),  it ran for six incredible years on the Backlot Stage, then abruptly ended. The show is now infamous in the annals of Disney entertainment history as a cautionary tale for anyone who thinks being cast in a successful show equates to job security.

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The story goes that Hunchback went down for one of its periodic refurbishments, as all shows and attractions that run 365 days a year have to do. However, not only wasn’t any refurbishing work done but part way through the refurbishment period, it was announced that the show wasn’t coming back. No explanations, just it’s done. It would be pure speculation how much management knew in advance of the decision to close (somebody somewhere was very aware). It also isn’t clear as to why the decision was made, although the best guess is that the company was no longer willing to shell out for the size of the cast required with the amount of costly expertise needed to pull the production off. What is clear is that there wasn’t a burning desire to put something else in Hunchback’s place. The Backlot Stage stood empty for years after the show’s closing.

Not to be left out of the Hunchback celebration on this day, in 1996, Disneyland also debuted their own show, The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Festival of Fools. Festival of Fools was similar to A Musical Adventure in that it was a retelling of the film but it was a very different staging of the story. The Disneyland version had more of a carnival atmosphere than a stage show. Festival wasn’t nearly as successful and only ran for two years.

June 13 - Mary Wickes

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On this day, in 1910, Mary Isabella Wickenhauser was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Mary’s parents loved the theater and began taking their daughter to see shows as soon as she was old enough to stay awake through an entire one. She was extremely intelligent for her age, ended up skipping not one but two grades and graduated from high school when she was only 16. She graduated from Washington University in 1930 with a double major of English Literature and Political Science with the intent of going into a career in law. But (and there always seems to be a but, doesn’t there), a professor said she should try a little acting, you know, just for fun. So she did. The law career never materialized.

By 1934, Mary was on Broadway having simplified her last name to Wickes. Her first show was The Farmer Takes a Wife with Henry Fonda. She followed Farmer up with runs in Stage Door, Hitch Your Wagon, Father Malachy's Miracle and Stars in Your Eyes. Her breakthrough role came in 1939 when she originated the uptight nurse Miss Preen in Kaufman and Hart’s classic comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner. The show enjoyed an almost two year run and when it came time to make the film version in 1942, Mary and star Monty Woolley were the only two cast members to make the leap to the big screen.

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The next two years were busy ones for Mary. She appeared in eleven films including the Abbott and Costello mystery Who Done It? She slowed down slightly after that, doing eight more movies through the end of the decade, perfecting her persona of the character who appears to be stodgy at first (like a nun or a secretary) but spits out the most sassy one liners by the picture’s end. Through the same time period, Mary also appeared in six more Broadway shows, ending with Town House in 1948. It would be three more decades before she returned to the Great White Way, when she spent nearly a year as Aunt Eller in a 1979 revival of Oklahoma!

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Mary’s career television career practically began with the medium itself. Though NBC had been broadcasting television since 1939 (CBS started a couple of years later), it wasn’t until after World War II that people began buying sets and actual content was needed. Mary’s first appearances came in 1948 on two episodes of Actors Studio on the brand new ABC network. She continued showing up on various anthology shows, including an episode of Studio One in Hollywood in 1949 as Mary Poppins (preceding Julie Andrews by fifteen years!). Her first series as a regular cast member came in 1953 as part of The Danny Thomas Show. She spent the first three seasons playing Liz O’neal. Over the next four decades, Mary would guest star in dozens of episodes of show ranging from whatever Lucille Ball’s latest series was to M*A*S*H to Punky Brewster to a Hallmark Hall of Fame adaptation of The Man Who Came to Dinner in which she reprised he role of Miss Preen. She appeared as a regular cast member on eight more series, including Mrs. G. Goes to College (which earned her an Emmy nomination in 1962) and the show she’s probably best known for, Father Dowling Mysteries with Tom Bosley. She also had a few dozen supporting roles in films over the remainder of her career, including a turn as the housekeeper of the inn featured in White Christmas, Mrs. Squires in The Music Man and Aunt March in the 1994 version of Little Women.

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Mary enjoyed a number of positions in the Disney family during her career. She first worked for the company on two of its early television shows. She was Katie, the housekeeper, for the serial Walt Disney Presents: Annette which aired during the third season of The Mickey Mouse Club and she played Dolores Bastinado in three episodes of the first season of Zorro, both in 1958. She then played a pivotal, if entirely unseen, role in 1961’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians as the live action model for the classic villain, Cruella de Vil. Thirty-one years later, Mary delighted audiences as the crusty old Sister Mary Lazarus in Touchstone Pictures’ Sister Act and its sequel, Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit. Her final role with Disney (her final role with any studio for that matter) was as a wisecracking gargoyle named Laverne in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

As Mary got older, she suffered from the usual list of illnesses that plague us all. Unfortunately for her, she fell during one of her hospitalizations and broke her hip. Complications from the resulting surgery proved to be too much for her and she died on October 22, 1995 at the age of 85. She was one recording session away from finishing her work on Hunchback; if you listen carefully, you might be able to pick out the six lines that Jane Withers had to record in her place. She never married nor did she have any children, so, besides the millions of laughs she left behind, her legacy was to use her estate to establish a $2 million memorial fund in her parent’s names at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, thereby honoring the people who planted the seeds of her remarkable career so many years before.

March 6 - Stephen Schwartz

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On this day, in 1948, Stephen Lawrence Schwartz was born in New York, New York. Stephen studied piano and composition at Juilliard while taking regular classes at Mineola High School on Long Island. While a student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, he wrote an early version of Pippin that was performed by the school's student run theater group, Scotch'n'Soda. He graduated in 1968, returned to New York City and began a career as a producer for RCA Records. It turned out to not be a terribly long career.

In 1970, Stephen was asked to be the musical director for America's first rock opera, The Survival of St. Joan (it's also America's first medieval rock opera if you're keeping track of that sort of thing and, before you ask, Tommy was British). Starring F. Murray Abraham and the band Smoke Rise, St. Joan had 16 off-Broadway performances before releasing an album, which Steven produced. The following year, he was hired to write new music and lyrics for the quirky retelling of the life of Jesus, Godspell, which had started life as the thesis of another Carnegie Mellon student, John-Michael Tebelak. In 1972, a new version of Pippin made it's Broadway debut, with the same concept as his college version but entirely different songs. Two years later, Stephen wrote the music and lyrics for The Magic Show. At the age of 26, he had three hit shows running simultaneously on Broadway. Not bad for a kid from Long Island (or anywhere else) if you ask me.

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In 1978, Stephen added director to the hats he wears with the musical Working, based on the book by Studs Terkel. His efforts earned him a Drama Desk award and the position of co-director for the television version. Stephen then took a break during the Eighties. He only wrote a children's book called The Perfect Peach, the music and lyrics for the one act children's musical Captain Louie, music for the revue Personals and lyrics for the musical Rags. He clearly wasn't applying himself during the me decade.

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Stephen became part of the Disney family in 1995 when he wrote the lyrics to Alan Menken's music for Pocahontas. It was the first Disney movie that Alan would work on without any input from his long time collaborator Howard Ashman. It worked out. Colors of the Wind won the pair an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Grammy. Stephan and Alan paired together again for The Hunchback of Notre Dame a year later.

In 2000, Stephan was tapped as composer and lyricist for a musical version of Pinocchio called Geppetto that aired on The Wonderful World of Disney. A stage version of Geppetto was then created (and given a new cumbersome name, Disney's My Son Pinocchio: Geppetto's Musical Tale) which of course comes with a Jr. version. Stephen re-teamed with Alan for 2007's Enchanted, three songs of which earned Oscar nominations. His last contribution (so far) to Disneyana is the theme song for the television show Johnny and the Sprites, which aired on the Disney Channel starting in 2005.

Outside of Disney, Stephen wrote music and lyrics for the Dreamwork's production The Prince of Egypt, picking up another Oscar for When You Believe. He also was composer and lyricist on another Broadway show you might have heard of, Wicked, which won three Tony Awards, six Drama Desk Awards and a Grammy. Wicked also pushed Stephen into an elite group: he is one of only two composers to have three Broadway shows run for more than 1,500 performances (the other is Jerry Herman of Hello, Dolly! fame).

In recent years, Stephen has managed to keep himself busy. He's created a stage version of The Prince of Egypt, composed three original shows for Princess Cruise Lines and was rumored to be writing songs for a sequel to Enchanted. His next definite project, slated to come out in 2021, is a film version of Wicked.