With eight Oscars, 11 Grammys and a Tony vying for space on his mantelpiece, Alan Menken’s bill for dry-cleaning tuxedos might well match the box office of most Off-Broadway openings.
The legendary US composer has picked up more than 100 nominations at major awards ceremonies in an illustrious five-decade career that has produced some of Disney’s best-loved animated movies.
With this year’s awards season about to hit full stride, the 67-year-old New Yorker could now join exalted company as a member of the select “EGOT” club — winners of the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony.
“Awards are a wonderful barometer of how much your career is appreciated by your peers. But if I don’t win, I’ll live,” he told AFP.
“Ever since I got the Oscars, the Grammys and the Tony, that whisper in my ear from people kept coming: ‘EGOT, EGOT, EGOT!’ It’s like a monkey on my back.”
Only 12 entertainers in history have joined the EGOT club, including such luminaries as John Gielgud, Audrey Hepburn and — among those still alive — Whoopi Goldberg and Mel Brooks.
Menken gets to be the 13th if “A New Season,” his song from musical comedy “Galavant,” wins for outstanding original music and lyrics in September’s Emmy Awards for television.
Menken hopes the ditty — with its rhyming couplet “We’re gonna have to kill ya if you sing the freakin’ song/It didn’t win an Emmy, now it’s time to move along” — might tickle the Television Academy.
Born in Manhattan to aspiring actress Judy Menken and her boogie-woogie piano-playing dentist husband Norman, the aspiring maestro grew up watching Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals like “Oklahoma” and “Carousel.”
After graduating from NYU in musicology, he formed a writing partnership with Howard Ashman on “Little Shop of Horrors” (1982), which went on to become the highest grossing Off-Broadway show ever.
The pair were hired by Disney to write “The Little Mermaid” in 1989 and since then Menken has scored many of the studio’s biggest hits, including “Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin” and “Pocahontas.”

Source: Arab News