Beauty & the Beast Composer Alan Menken Praises Live-Action Remake Cast

Legendary Disney composer Alan Menken seems hugely pleased with how the upcoming live-action remake from director Bill Condon is shaping up.

The 67-year old composer - whose multiple Oscar wins include both Best Original Score and Best Original Song for the 1991 animated classic – tells Entertainment Weekly that the cast are doing sterling work all around.

Of Emma Watson, Menken declares, “She’s really good! I can’t picture anyone else, honestly. She’s Belle for me now entirely.”

Nor did his praise stop there. Menken calls Luke Evans “a revelation” as the boorish Gaston, and of Dan Stevens’ Beast he says, “of course, he spends a lot of the movie with a lot of fur covering him but he’s great.”

All in all he concludes, “The cast is just a dream cast, it’s ridiculous.”

The ensemble is filled out by Kevin Kline as Belle’s father, Josh Gad as Le Fou, Emma Thompson as Mrs Potts, Ian McKellen as Cogsworth and Ewan McGregor as Lumiere.

Since the 1991 hit movie, Disney’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’ was successfully adapted into a stage musical, which Menken also worked on – yet he’s still had more new work to be done on this latest adaptation.

“It’s exciting. For me because I’m writing the new songs and scoring the new movie, it’s a lot of work.

“It’s interesting and it’s challenging to come back to the same source material three times. And in this case I’m really taking my lead – I am bearer of the flame to a degree, but I want to be as good a team member with Bill Condon as I can be.

“So I’m really taking my lead from him as a director, and he’s doing a great job.”

We’ll all get to see just how good a job Condon and company have done when ‘Beauty and the Beast’ opens in UK cinemas on 17 March 2017.

Picture Credit: Disney, WENN

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