So after Snow White we headed back to the room. As usual Fran laid down for a nap and I checked the DIS and other online stuff. This is what I had for dinner.
I believe that the concert started at 8PM and the doors opened at 7:30. One of the reasons that we paid for Diamond level admission is that this is what everyone else waited in to get into the show floor. If you look carefully at the floor you will see that taped on the floor are clear lines for people to wait in for the show. You can bet that each one of those lines that you see at the front, goes clear to the back of the room.
This was the diamond level line. This clump is the front of the line.
And then it extended back from there. Only 100 people or so were diamond level.
Finally we were seated.
Steven Clark introduced our entertainer for the night.
And the Man, Alan Menken, evidently the lights were rather bright.
He immediately sat down at the piano and began playing, singing and introducing the numbers that he was going to play.
His first musical was an Off Broadway production called God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, an adaptation of a Kurt Vonnegut novel. This was one his first collaborations with Harold Ashman who later become his long time writing partner.
This was well received, but three years later he achieved much more success with the Off Broadway Musical Little Shop of Horrors on which Ashman also collaborated. From this show he sang all sort of tunes, of course the Main Title Song.
But he also sang
Somewhere Thats Green, Dentist, Suddenly Seymour, Feed Me, perhaps some others that escape my mind.
Ashman wrote the screenplay for the 1986 Marvin Hamlisch musical
Smile, so he played a couple numbers from that show. I dont remember which ones as its not a real familiar musical to me.
Then he moved on to his best-known works, those with Disney. His first Disney feature that he worked on with Ashman was
The Little Mermaid. From this feature he sang
Part of your World, Under the Sea, Poor Unfortunate Souls and probably more.
He talked to us about writing the music and how it came to be that Sebastian was Jamaican. I dont quite remember, but he had the melody in his mind and just thought how cool it would be to have a calypso tune in there to lighten the mood. It had nothing to do with the story line, but it totally changed the film. He also mentioned about how he received two Oscars for this film and he was feeling pretty darned good about working for Disney at that point. However, this was right around the time that they also learned that Ashman was diagnosed with AIDS. Ashman had been working on a pet project called,
Alladin but agreed to sign on with Menken to work on Beauty and the Beast. To accommodate Ashman's failing health, pre-production of Beauty and the Beast was moved from London to the Residence Inn in Fishkill, New York, close to Ashman's New York City home
Since the original story had only two major characters, the filmmakers enhanced them, added new characters in the form of enchanted household items who "add warmth and comedy to a gloomy story" and guide the audience through the film, and added a "real villain" in the form of Gaston. The animated objects were, however, given distinct personalities in the Disney version. By early 1990, Katzenberg had approved the revised script, and storyboarding began again. The production flew story artists back and forth between California and New York for storyboard approvals from Ashman, though the team was not told the reason why.
"Human Again" was dropped from the film before animation began, as its lyrics caused story problems about the timeline over which the story takes place. This required Ashman and Menken to write a new song in its place. "Something There", in which Belle and Beast sing (via voiceover) of their growing fondness for each other, was composed late in production and inserted into the script in place of "Human Again". Menken would later revise "Human Again" for inclusion in the 1994 Broadway stage version of Beauty and the Beast, and another revised version of the song was added to the film itself in a new sequence created for the film's Special Edition re-release in 2002.
I think he included this song in the medley that he sang which also had
Belle, Gaston, Beauty and the Beast, Be Our Guest as well. Ashman died of AIDS-related complications on March 14, 1991, eight months prior to the release of the film. He never saw the finished film, members of the film's production team visited him after the film's well-received first screening, with Don Hahn commenting that "the film would be a great success. Who'd have thought it?", to which Ashman replied with "I would." A tribute to the lyricist was included at the end of the credits crawl:
"To our friend, Howard, who gave a mermaid her voice, and a beast his soul. We will be forever grateful. Howard Ashman: 19501991".
[Continued in Next Post]
