Ashman’s directions for “Something There”

While writing the lyrics to songs in Beauty and the Beast, Howard Ashman’s health was deteriorating. The composer, Alan Menken, recalls:

By a certain point, he wasn’t well enough to travel. Once Disney knew, they brought a lot of the production over to the east coast; he made it through all the last recording sessions. For Something There, Paige O’Hara was singing the line: “New, and a bit alarming.” By now Howard was nearly blind and could barely talk. But he said in this hoarse whisper, over the phone from his bed: “Tell Paige, when she gets to ‘alarming’: Streisand!” Next came all the scoring sessions, and pre-production for the animation, but by then he was gone.

Ben Beaumont-Thomas and Phil Hoad, “How we made Beauty and the Beast”, The Guardian, 14 March 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/mar/13/how-we-made-beauty-and-the-beast. Accessed 22 July 2021.

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