Alan Menken has spent a lifetime writing musicals. But even to this day, the EGOT-winning composer will admit working on a new musical is a supremely difficult task, and not for the faint of heart: “There's a reason why musicals are so often adaptations,” says the composer. It’s because in an adaptation, the story beats are already there, which makes it easier to pinpoint the emotional moments that call for a song.

But for an original musical, you have to create the story whole-cloth while figuring out where the songs should go. Which for Menken, as he admits with a bit of chagrin, isn't as fun as it sounds. As he exclaims: “When people say, ‘Write any song you feel like writing.’ I go, ‘Oh, that's hell.’ That's hell! Tell me you want a song sung by, you know, someone who's late for a train, who's coming from East Side to West Side. Give me all the specifics, then I know how to write the song.”

That’s partially why for the new animated musical film Spellbound—for which Menken composed the music with longtime writing partner, lyricist Glenn Slater—the two have been working on it for five years, and the first two years were admittedly difficult. That was because in those early years, the film’s director, Vicky Jenson, and its three screenwriters (Lauren Hynek, Elizabeth Martin, and Julia Miranda) were still trying to figure out the arc of their story.

In the film, which was released by Netflix November 22, Romeo + Juliet’s Rachel Zegler is the voice of Princess Ellian, whose parents have been turned into monsters. With her parents indisposed, Ellian is forced to become the adult in the room, running the magical kingdom of Lumbria and figuring out a way to turn her parents back into humans. The film also features the voices of John Lithgow, Jenifer Lewis, Tituss Burgess, Nathan Lane, Javier Bardem, and Nicole Kidman.

Spoilers ahead!

While Spellbound is set in a magical land, it is gradually revealed that the film is actually an allegory about divorce—that Ellian’s parents are monsters because they can’t stop fighting, making Ellian feel like she has to be the one to keep the family together. “There's no romantic arc to this at all,” says Menken. “There's no villain. So that dramatic tension really has to come from Ellian’s inner journey, and how we express that.”

Slater has worked with Menken on Disney's Tangled and The Little Mermaid on Broadway. He describes Spellbound as a kind of “inverted fairy tale” because it takes the tropes of the Disney princess musical movie genre, but uses it to tell a different kind of story—one where the heroine and her family go on an emotional journey rather than a physical one. Musically, that meant that Slater and Menken used the musical theatre conventions that audiences understood while also upending expectations.

As Slater explains: “We have an upbeat opening number where the heroine is introducing us to her world, but what she's really doing is hiding, trying to hide from us the reality of how she feels about the world, putting a positive spin on what we can clearly see is not a positive situation. We have a song that functions the way a villain song does, but it's sung by her two advisors who actually just want the best for her…And so all the way through, we're always playing with those conventions. Because this is a fairy tale, but it's kind of an inverted fairy tale. And it doesn't really have a happy ending, but it has its own sort of internal logic that makes it work on its own terms.”

Nowhere is this play on musical conventions clearer than in Ellian’s “I want” song, which is called “The Way It Was Before.” While a typical musical theatre “I want” song is forward looking, “The Way It Was Before” is nostalgic, opening with a pensive solo piano.

“We realized that we didn't have any moment for our audience to understand what was at stake for Ellian, because what she desperately wants is for her parents to get back together,” explains Slater. “But we, up until that song, haven't seen what that means for her: What were her parents like? What was that relationship like? What would getting that back actually entail?”

Continues Menken: “I love what they do visually [in the film], where it's actually this broken piano, which is kind of a metaphor for a broken family. It's wistful, but it has a hopeful overview. And the way we work is music first. I'll be at the piano and play with ideas. And when we get to the thing, it just feels right.”

All this may feel like a more mature story, perhaps too mature for young audiences. But in a world where divorce is common, Menken and Slater see Spellbound as a way to soothe young viewers who may be in that situation. And to assure them that they don’t need to be the heroes in their own families.

“We've seen how children watch these kinds of movies and really take the lessons to heart, even if it's subliminally,” explains Slater. “And so we wanted to make sure that children didn't feel like they were the ones that have to get their parents back together, that it's their job to hold the family together, that they should feel guilty, or they're somehow at fault because of what's happening in their family. That's a lot for an animated film to take on, but once we decided to take that on, we had to deal with it honestly and make sure that we were giving a message to children that wasn't going to be a level of heroism that no child can actually achieve.”

Menken even admits to feeling “deeply emotional” while working on the film. Even though he’s been married to his own wife, Janis, for over 50 years, what Ellian and her parents go through in Spellbound feels familiar to any family that has had rough patches. “We have a solid marriage, but still, I can identify with things that happened in our lives that deeply affected our daughters,” says Menken. “I can see it in the rearview mirror, and that kind of breaks my heart.”

And at the end of the day, isn’t that what a good musical can do? Help us see situations in our own lives with more clarity? “Musicals can't just be this brain,” says Menken, pointing to his head, before gesturing to his heart. “The gut has got to be a very, very big tool in creating a successful musical.”

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Photos: Spellbound on Netflix

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