Alan Menken

Alan Menken (born July 22, 1949, New Rochelle, New York, U.S.) is an American composer whose captivating scores helped invigorate the animated feature films of the Walt Disney Company.

As a young man, Menken enrolled in a premedical program at New York University but ultimately graduated with a degree in music. He then earned money by performing in clubs, composing advertising jingles, and providing accompaniment for ballerinas at practice. A career break came when playwright and lyricist Howard Ashman picked Menken to collaborate with him on the 1979 play God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, based on a novel by Kurt Vonnegut. Although they attained mild success with that production, it was not until 1982 that they achieved significant critical and commercial acclaim with the Off-Broadway production of Little Shop of Horrors. The duo subsequently adapted their score for the 1986 film.

In the late 1980s Jeffrey Katzenberg, at the time chairman of Walt Disney Studios, offered the team a list of projects. Menken and Ashman chose to tackle an animated musical version of the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Little Mermaid,” which was released in 1989. The resulting collaboration earned Menken two Academy Awards and his first of numerous Grammy Awards, among other accolades. The team’s next Disney project, Beauty and the Beast (1991), was nominated for best picture and earned Menken another two Oscars.

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Ashman died in 1991 after having begun work with Menken on what would become another Disney success, Aladdin (1992), and Menken subsequently teamed up with lyricist Tim Rice. Aladdin became one of Disney’s biggest animated hits, and it netted Menken two more Academy Awards. Newsies (1992), a live-action Disney musical for which Menken wrote songs (with lyricist Jack Feldman), was less successful. For his next two Disney films, Menken collaborated with lyricist Stephen Schwartz on Pocahontas (1995) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996). Pocahontas won Menken his seventh and eighth Oscars, in the categories of best musical or comedy score and best original song (“Colors of the Wind”). Menken later worked with David Zippel on the score for Hercules (1997) and again with Schwartz on the music for Enchanted (2007). Other films for which he contributed scores included Tangled (2010; with lyricist Glenn Slater), Mirror Mirror (2012; Menken wrote lyrics for all but one song), and live-action remakes of Beauty and the Beast (2017) and Aladdin (2019).

Menken also continued to work in the theatre. With Slater he composed for the musicals Sister Act (first performed 2006) and Leap of Faith (2010), both of which were based on 1992 films. He made stage adaptations of Beauty and the Beast (1994), The Little Mermaid (2008), Newsies (2012), and Aladdin (2014). Though Newsies was not a huge hit on-screen, the stage production earned Menken a Tony Award for best original score. He later wrote the music for A Bronx Tale (2016).

In 2020 Menken won a Daytime Emmy Award for the song “Waiting in the Wings,” which was featured in the children’s TV series Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure. With the victory, he became the 16th person to win the four major North American entertainment awards (EGOT: Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony).