Howard: Done too soon

Howard (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated TV-PG, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.28.20

 

I remember — vividly — when everything changed.

 

Songs had been an essential part of Disney animated features going all the way back to 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, although their placement — and quality — tended to be random.

 

Lyricist Howard Ashman works with star Paige O'Hara, in order to shape her performance
so that the nuances of "Belle," the opening story-song in Beauty and the Beast, are
perfect from start to finish.

Every hit that emerged — “When You Wish Upon a Star,” from Pinocchio; “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” from Cinderella; and “The Bare Necessities,” from The Jungle Book — left dozens of instantly forgettable tunes behind. Most did little to augment or advance their respective storylines; they were simply jammed into the film every so often, of necessity (so the theory went), to prevent viewers from getting bored between songs.

 

Such films were no different than clumsy live-action movie musicals, where the action would pause — for no good reason — just so the characters could break into song.

 

Then, after Disney churned out a series of unremarkable animated features from the mid-1970s through most of the ’80s, came 1989’s The Little Mermaid.

 

Such a revelation.

 

It felt as though the genre had been re-invented as a professional Broadway musical, with clever, lyric-rich songs that not only were their own integrated book, but were brilliantly employed to advance the plot.

 

No surprise, since the songs came from somebody who grew up with a Broadway musical mentality.

 

Disney documentarian Don Hahn’s Howard, debuting on Disney Plus, is an affectionate, long-overdue tribute to Howard Ashman, the genius lyricist who — alongside composer Alan Menken — virtually transformed the Disney animated musical template. The tragic irony: Even as this was happening — even as The Little Mermaid was released, on Nov. 17, 1989; even as Ashman was working on the studio’s next two projects — he had only 16 months to live.

 

Ashman was one of the early, high-profile individuals to die of AIDS, at a time when the disease still was cruelly dismissed as “gay cancer.” Hahn’s film doesn’t shy from this aspect of Ashman’s final years; the approach is equally frank with respect to his gay lifestyle. Such candor speaks to Hahn’s belief that we now live in more enlightened times, which contrasts greatly to the challenges Ashman faced, as he grew up and entered the entertainment industry.

 

But this is only subtext (albeit crucially important). Hahn unearthed an astonishing treasure trove of found material — home movies, grainy VHS footage, cassette song demos, even answering machine tapes — that depict Ashman’s life as it happened. Talking heads are minimal, although numerous people — Menken, Ashman’s younger sister Sarah, theater collaborator Kyle Renick and others — supply commentary against the archival footage.

 

To every degree possible, as well, Hahn extracts interview clips so that Ashman can tell his own story.

 

Sarah’s memories are the most poignant and enlightening. She recounts how, even as a child — with her barely beyond toddler status — he’d keep her entertained by transforming his bedroom into a magical wonderland of dimly illuminated tableaus (bits of cloth over lamps) created from whatever toys were at hand. He’d fabricate a story for each tableau on the spot, like a youthful Scheherazade.

 

Happily, their parents did not discourage the blindingly obvious path that young Howard was destined to take, as he matured through school productions and youth theater companies. More ambitious work while at Boston University and Goddard College led to a master’s degree from the University of Indiana, at which point he moved to New York.

 

Ashman, Renick and R. Stuart White revived the then-moribund Workshop of the Players Art Foundation (WPA), as an off-off-Broadway company in the fall of 1977, in a truly dodgy part of the city. Early productions included plays by Edward Albee and Lillian Hellman, interspersed with original works.

 

One of the latter — Ashman’s ambitious adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater — debuted his partnership with Menken. It was a smash success, which prompted Warner Bros. execs to throw money at the fledgling company, and move the show to a bigger theater in a better part of town … where it promptly bombed.

 

The lesson was painful, but telling; some shows, Ashman and Menken learned, need to be presented in 99-seat houses, where intimacy and proximity to the stagecraft played a crucial role.

 

Next up: Little Shop of Horrors, which they debuted in 1982 and subsequently ran for five years, becoming the highest-grossing production in Off-Broadway history. That run was ongoing when a feature-film adaptation appeared in 1986, meaning Ashman and Menken had simultaneous hits of the same show in two different mediums.

 

They were ready, when Disney came calling.

 

(Rather oddly, Hahn’s film makes no mention of the fact that Ashman’s first musical contribution for the studio was the clever story-song — “Once Upon a Time in New York City” — that opened 1988’s Oliver & Company, and which he wrote with composer Barry Mann. I’ve always suspected that song was an “audition” for what followed.)

 

Ashman made no apologies for being an obsessive, detail-oriented, nit-picky control freak. It’s clear, during several sequences, that — like most geniuses — he didn’t suffer fools gladly. At the same time, it’s fascinating to watch him work with Jodi Benson (Ariel, in The Little Mermaid) and Paige O’Hara (Belle, in Beauty and the Beast), as he coaxes the proper intonation of each syllable of a given song … and how spot-on his suggestions always are.

 

By now a charter member of the Why-won’t-idiots-get-out-of-my-way club, we learn that Ashman’s imperious behavior placed him in great peril of being fired from The Little Mermaid. The subsequent trio of Academy Awards forever removed that threat, but by this point a new — far more serious — problem had cropped up.

 

Although the next project scheduled was Aladdin, Disney’s Jeffrey Katzenberg wasn’t satisfied with the story outline; despite the presence of several Ashman/Menken songs, it was shelved for further work, while Beauty and the Beast was fast-tracked in its place.

 

Which brings us to the most touching portion of this saga: the degree to which Katzenberg moved mountains in order to oblige Ashman’s rapidly declining health, so that he could continue to work on Beauty and the Beast, while not telling anybody the reason for such accommodations. It was “only” 1990, and Ashman (quite reasonably) feared being fired and/or blackballed, if word got out that he had AIDS.

 

It’s also telling, in hindsight, to consider an angry personal subtext in that film’s climactic tune, “The Mob Song,” as Gaston and his mesmerized followers prepare to storm the castle because “there’s something truly terrible inside.”

 

Hahn refrains from anything even close to preaching; Ashman’s saga simply progresses to its tragic conclusion … by which point, there likely won’t be a dry eye in the house.

 

He’d been dead for eight months, when Beauty and the Beast debuted Nov. 22, 1991; he wasn’t around to see it become the first animated feature nominated for Best Picture, or to receive yet another Oscar for Best Original Song.

 

But we can thank him for the enduring Renaissance of Disney animated musicals, many of them by Menken and new lyricists: numerous classics that honored their Broadway-style roots by becoming equally successful stage productions, and then live-action films. Like George Gershwin and numerous other musical prodigies, Ashman accomplished a great deal in a cruelly brief period of time: work that will forever endure as part of the Great American Songbook.