We are thrilled to honor legendary composer Alan Menken with the Howard Ashman Award at the 2024 GMHC Cabaret! Menken will be celebrated by Broadway performers and friends at Joe’s Pub on February 26 for an intimate evening of music from the Ashman-Menken songbook.
“Who better to carry forward the vision, passion, and storytelling of Howard Ashman than his composing partner for his most beloved shows? Without Alan Menken, there is no Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, or Aladdin,” said GMHC Vice President of Policy Jason Cianciotto.
“It’s going to be an amazing night,” said Cianciotto, who is co-producing the Cabaret with his husband, Broadway performer Courter Simmons. Kyle Branzel is the music director. “We’ll build the songs around the performers—and we may have some fun mashing things up,” Cianciotto added.
Ashman and Menken ushered in the Disney Renaissance in 1989 with The Little Mermaid after collaborating on Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Little Shop of Horrors. “Howard understood the essence of what storytelling needed to be,” Menken said in 2020 when Disney+ released Howard, a documentary about the brilliant lyricist.
Perhaps the most personal song that Ashman collaborated on with Menken was “Sheridan Square,” an early 1980’s elegy for the friends he was losing to the AIDS epidemic.
Cianciotto did not learn that Ashman’s death in 1991 at age 40 was due to complications from AIDS until he saw Waking Sleeping Beauty, an earlier documentary about the Disney Renaissance. At the time he and Simmons were organizing the first Cabaret and Ashman Award in 2013.
“It was so important to us to memorialize and honor Howard in a way that shined a light on how HIV and AIDS affected him and so many other artists and entertainers,” Cianciotto said. Ashman’s sister, Sarah Ashman Gillespie, accepted the inaugural Howard Ashman Award on his behalf.
Since then, Cianciotto said, the award has honored people in theater who have used their talents to increase awareness about HIV and AIDS. “Stigma is a leading structural driver of the epidemic,” Cianciotto said. “How better to fight that stigma than honor Howard Ashman—and now Alan Menken, whose creations have inspired the world?”
Ashman and Menken won the Academy Award for best original song for Beauty and the Beast. The film was released eight months after Ashman’s death. “This is the first Academy Award given to someone we’ve lost to AIDS,” said his life partner, Bill Lauch, in a brave public statement at the 1992 Oscars. At the time, stigma around AIDS and anti-gay hate crimes were rampant.
Among many accolades, Ashman and Menken also won an Oscar for best original song for The Little Mermaid. For both The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, Menken won Oscars for best original score. He is one of very few artists to win the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Awards (EGOT) over his prolific career.
The Cabaret’s award in Ashman’s memory recognizes that HIV and AIDS are still with us, Cianciotto said. “Thankfully, far fewer people are dying of AIDS-related complications. But today, long-term HIV survivors struggle with other health complications.”
At this year’s Cabaret, he said, “I want people to feel a sense of joy and celebration for the music they love from our honoree, Alan Menken, and a sense of mourning for Howard Ashman and others who’ve died in the epidemic. And I want them to feel inspired to continue the fight to end the epidemic, however they can.”
To buy tickets for the GMHC Cabaret and Howard Ashman Award, click here.
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