On May 17, 1950, Howard Ashman was born. Ashman wrote song lyrics, most frequently working with composer Alan Menken. Together, Ashman and Menken were major figures in the renaissance of Disney animation in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Ashman and Menken met in the mid-1970s at the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop in New York, a training program for aspiring musical writers. Their first collaboration was an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. The show played off-Broadway for a month in 1979. There was no recording at the time, but when the show was revived in 2017 by the Encores! Program, a series of concert performances of unfairly neglected musicals from the past, that cast recorded the show.
The next show from Ashman and Menken did much better. Little Shop of Horrors was based on Roger Corman’s 1960 horror-comedy movie about an alien plant that wants to take over the earth. Ashman and Menken steered hard into the comedy side of the story and filled it with musical references to 1960s pop. The show had a five-year run, very long for off-Broadway, and was the highest-grossing off-Broadway show yet when it closed in 1987.
Ashman was busy with multiple projects in 1986. He made his Broadway debut, working not with Menken but with Marvin Hamlisch. The musical Smile was based on Michael Ritchie’s 1975 film about the contestants and organizers of a California beauty pageant. The show ran for only five weeks and has never been recorded.
Also in 1986, the film version of Little Shop of Horrors was released. Ashman and Menken wrote a new song for the alien plant, “Mean Green Mother from Outer Space,” which made a small bit of history when it became the first Oscar-nominated song to include profanity in its lyrics.
The movie originally kept the musical’s dark ending, in which the plant wins and threatens to eat the entire audience. Director Frank Oz shot an elaborate special effects sequence, which reportedly cost $5,000,000, and it had to be scrapped after audiences in test screenings hated it. A happier ending was filmed, and Oz said he learned an important lesson: “In a stage play, you kill the leads and they come out for a bow—in a movie, they don't come out for a bow, they're dead.” Little Shop of Horrors was only modestly successful in theaters, but it did very well in home video.
But perhaps the most important project Ashman worked on in 1986 was the smallest. He was recruited by Disney to write a single song for their upcoming animated musical Oliver & Company. While there, he learned about their plans to make a movie of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Ashman and Menken were hired to write the songs for the movie, and Ashman became very involved in the development of the film. He contributed to story meetings, and played an important role in casting, insisting that the major roles should be played by actors who could do their own singing and do it well. Ashman’s work paid off. The Little Mermaid was an enormous success, the first major hit for Disney animation in twenty years. “Under the Sea” won the Academy Award for Best Song, and “Kiss the Girl” was also nominated. In 1988, while working on The Little Mermaid, Ashman proposed to Disney that their next project should be a musical version of Aladdin. The studio liked the idea, and Ashman and Menken began writing songs.
Disney was already working on a Beauty and the Beast movie, which they had originally conceived as a non-musical. The development wasn’t going well, and Ashman and Menken were asked to join the project, now re-imagined as a musical. Ashman was reluctant. He had recently been diagnosed with AIDS and knew that he probably didn’t have many years left to live. He wanted to focus on his health, and put what energy he had for work into Aladdin. But he agreed to take on Beauty and the Beast as well, and as with The Little Mermaid, had a major role in story development and casting.
Ashman didn’t live to see the finished version of Beauty and the Beast; he was in the hospital when it had its first press screenings, and he died a few days later, on March 14, 1991. The movie was released in November with an on-screen dedication “to our friend, Howard, who gave a mermaid her voice, and a beast his soul.” Three of the movie’s songs—“Belle,” “Be Our Guest,” and the title song—were Oscar nominees, and “Beauty and the Beast” won the Oscar.
About a month after Ashman’s death, Disney decided that Aladdin needed to be re-written. Only three of the sixteen songs that Ashman and Menken had written made it into the new version of the movie, the scene-setting “Arabian Knights” and the two showcase numbers for Robin Williams as the Genie, “Prince Ali” and “Friend Like Me”, for which Ashman received his seventh Academy Award nomination.
Since his death, Ashman’s musicals have continued to live on in new versions. Beauty and the Beast was the first Disney movie to be adapted for the stage, and it opened on Broadway in 1994; The Little Mermaid followed in 2008, and Aladdin in 2011. Little Shop of Horrors finally had its first Broadway production in 2003.
In recent years, Disney has begun producing live-action film versions of its animated classics. We’ve already had a live Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, and The Little Mermaid is in the planning stages. And there were reports this year that a film remake of Little Shop of Horrors is in development.
