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Don’t show that anymore
Howard Ashman works with Belle’s voice, Paige O’Hara.
“You may not know his name, but you know Howard Ashman’s music,” the film’s producer, Don Hahn, said in a statement. “He is one of the greatest talents of the 20th century that helped revitalize the American musical and revitalize Disney animation. He left us a collection of songs that still lives in us today, but his non-public story has never been fully told until now. . “
Howard presents evocative photographs of Ashman in so many recognizable songs. The film includes Jodi Benson’s audition as Ariel’s voice in The Little Mermaid; Ashman giving orders to Paige O’Hara, who expresses Beauty in Beauty and the Beast; and the recording of Be Our Guest with Jerry Orbach and Angela Lansbury. His story also unfolds through interviews with Ashman’s husband, Bill Lauch, family members, friends, classmates, actors and the disney musical’s spouse, Alan Menken.
Ashman began performing in his garden with local youth and grew up writing poems, songs, short stories and plays before reading theater at university, where he wrote a musical edition of The Snow Queen for his thesis. His first assignment for Disney was to edit the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse scrapbook while he was a suffering playwright in New York.
But he soon began his own theater and, despite everything, came to paint with prominent Disney composer Alan Menken. Ashman and Menken teamed up to write the musicals God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in 1979 and Little Shop of Horrors in 1982, the latter of which resulted in a film. The two went to Disney in combination and began running on The Little Mermaid, Menken writing the music and Ashman writing the lyrics. “There’s something about Disney fairy tale cartoons going back to Snow White and then Pinocchio,” Ashman said in an interview.
She wrote Part of Your World, the song where Ariel aspires to be human, minutes after hearing the plot of The Little Mermaid. “Using The Little Mermaid, he literally taught us how to tell a song story,” Hahn said.
Ashman wrote the lyrics to all the songs on The Little Mermaid.
It’s thanks to Ashman that the narrative song has a cornerstone of Disney Animation. He liked to write for the bad guys. “They’re more fun, I don’t know why … and Ursula is a particularly fun villain,” she says, writing Poor Unfortunate Souls.
“We found ourselves in the only video box where musicals can work, and that’s in animation at Disney,” he once said a few days after being diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. Her diagnosis followed the deaths of several of her friends and an ex-boyfriend of the disease years earlier.
The documentary continues its decline in fitness as it bravely progresses, based on the lyrics of Friend Like Me by Aladdin and Prince Ali. His colleagues even packed the storyboards for Beauty and the Beast and took the paintings north of New York so that Ashman, in poor physical shape, can continue painting with them.
Ashman wrote the lyrics to Aladdin’s Friend Like Me.
Writing the lyrics to Jafar’s depraved song Humiliate the Boy, Ashman channeled his delight with the loss of sight, voice and sensation in his hands as his AIDS progressed. Although the song was cut from the finished film, the lyrics describe Jafar humiliating Aladdin by taking everything away from him. When he worked at Prince Ali, he was writing from his hospital bed.
Ashman won Academy Awards, Golden Globes and Grammys for the songs Under the Sea and Beauty and the Beast, as well as a Grammy for the album Aladdin. They were awarded in prison. Unfortunately, Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast were released until after his death.
After ashman’s untimely death, his Disney musical wife, Menken, continued to write sheet music for Tanged, Hercules, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Enchanted.
Howard launches on Disney Plus on Friday, August 7.
Beauty and the Beast is for Howard Ashman.