Songs for Any Era

NEW YORK — When Lynn Ahrens first saw Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” in 1990, the lyricist immediately decided that she and her songwriting partner, composer Stephen Flaherty, should be writing scores for animated films, not just stage musicals.

She headed straight home, packed up one of their tapes and sent if off with a letter to Disney chief Michael Eisner. “I’ve never done anything like that in my life,” Ahrens says today, “but I was taken by the [animated] movie musical. It was a whole new venue and so exciting.”

Ahrens says she never got a reply, but it didn’t matter. A few days later, a musical she wrote with Flaherty, “Once on This Island,” opened off-Broadway to rave reviews that prompted calls from several film studios. Development deals soon materialized with Disney and, later, Warner Bros., but it wasn’t until a project with 20th Century Fox came along that the songwriters completed their very first animated film, “Anastasia.”

This is clearly their moment. “Anastasia,” opening Nov. 21, comes at the same time Flaherty and Ahrens are being acclaimed for their work on the stage musical “Ragtime,” currently at Century City’s Shubert Theatre, and en route to Broadway.

With “Anastasia”--which will, in fact, be competing against a re-release of “The Little Mermaid” this month--Flaherty and Ahrens also join an expanding group of songwriters working both Broadway and animated features. Besides the ubiquitous Alan Menken, best known as composer of “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast,” the still small circle includes “The Lion King” lyricist Tim Rice (‘Evita”), “Pocahontas” lyricist Stephen Schwartz (“Godspell”) and “Hercules” lyricist David Zippel (“City of Angels”).

“Lynn and Steve have the same thing Alan Menken has--the ability to let a song take the narrative forward,” says Broadway director Mike Ockrent, who works with Ahrens and Menken each year on “A Christmas Carol,” the musical performed annually at Madison Square Garden, and is himself a creative consultant on Warner Bros.’ forthcoming animated film “Quest for Camelot.” “They write very accessible music that appeals to a wide audience, and they bring with them a wealth of knowledge and experience.”

Since their first produced show, the musical farce “Lucky Stiff” in 1988, Flaherty and Ahrens have used songs to spin a Caribbean fable (“Once on This Island”), re-create 1950s live television in “My Favorite Year” and portray turn-of-the-century America for “Ragtime.”

Now comes Fox’s $53-million tale of a spunky Russian princess pursued by an evil sorcerer and his albino bat, crafted during the same two-year period they were creating “Ragtime’s” epic score. For months on end, the songwriters bobbed back and forth between “Ragtime’s” 1906 America and “Anastasia’s” 1916 Russia and from their homes here to Toronto, where “Ragtime” took shape, and to Fox’s Los Angeles base.

Describing this period over coffee at Ahrens’ downtown loft, Flaherty leans across the dining room table: “And which was easier, you may ask.”

“Ragtime,” responds partner Ahrens. “Writing 2 1/2 hours of continuous music and song was in a certain way easier than writing seven simple 2 1/2-minute songs for an animated movie.”

“On ‘Ragtime,’ we wrote the music sequentially, and one section flowed into another musically. For ‘Anastasia,’ we wrote seven songs that fit into an outline. As the outline changed, the songs changed; sometimes we would be working on a solution for the end of the movie before we’d solved something at the beginning. But part of what makes our collaboration so strong is that we are very tenacious. We write and write until we find the right song.”

It’s what they’ve been doing since they met in 1982 at a musical theater workshop in New York. Flaherty, then 21, had just arrived in New York from Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, where he’d studied composition and yearned to write musicals. Ahrens, then 33, had already been through several careers. A journalism graduate of Syracuse University, she had worked as an advertising copywriter, jingle writer, singer and TV producer; she’d written many short animated songs for ABC’s “Schoolhouse Rock.”

They weren’t a likely match. The daughter of New York Bohemians whose baby sitters included the famed photographer Weegee, Ahrens is sophisticated and self-assured despite a professed shyness. Flaherty is Pittsburgh-born and raised and appears reserved, a bit more tenuous. While both are in long-term relationships with Englishmen, she is Jewish and married and he is Irish Catholic and single.

Yet, talking almost in tandem, they finish, augment and correct one another’s sentences and thoughts. They are, Ahrens explains, more alike than they look: “We both laugh and cry at the same things. We both get disturbed by the same things. We find the same things tasteless. I think we both live to work, have a very basic sense of family and are home-oriented people. And we enjoy each other.”

Ahrens knew economy of language and how to work with actors but had never worked in the theater. The composer, who calls himself “the original musical theater nerd,” had been carting musical scores home from the library since he was in high school.

“Lynn had a real freshness and whole different energy coming from pop,” Flaherty says. “She did a lot of her own singing and knows how to write for the voice. She knows rhythm and how certain vowels set easier on certain notes. Songwriting is about emotion; yet there are thousands and thousands of technical aspects to it.”

Until “Ragtime,” they generated their own projects, trying to profit from each mistake. After setting the film “Bedazzled” to music, then finding they couldn’t get the rights, they next opted for an original work. It wound up as what Ahrens calls “an idea in search of a story,” something they avoided with their next show: “The Emperor’s New Clothes” for Theatreworks/USA. Watching children react to it, says Ahrens, “taught us a lot about how to read an audience. Children are like little adults except that instead of looking at their watches they get up and start screaming and yelling.”

In 1988, Playwrights Horizons produced “Lucky Stiff,” a musical farce about an English shoe salesman who takes a dead body to Monte Carlo. “What separated them from a number of other writers who were also extremely talented was their great interest in craft and their great ability to work really hard and collaborate,” recalls Andre Bishop, then Playwrights’ artistic director.

Two years later, Playwrights produced the songwriting team’s first big hit, ‘Once on This Island.” Based on Trinidadian author Rosa Guy’s novel “My Love, My Love,” it became a critical and popular success that moved to Broadway, was nominated for eight 1991 Tonys, including best score, and played 457 performances.

Movie studios also appreciated “Once on This Island,” with its infectious blend of Calypso and pop ballads. With Disney’s 1989 “The Little Mermaid” illustrating anew the commercial potential for animated musicals, Disney and other studios were looking more and more to Broadway.

Starting with Disney, Flaherty and Ahrens began to explore the new arena of animated film, taking on projects at various studios that never fully materialized while simultaneously developing stage musicals. Among them was “My Favorite Year,” based on the film, which was developed in the short-lived New Musicals program at State University of New York, Purchase. When New Musicals failed, the project moved to Lincoln Center Theatre, now headed by their Playwrights mentor Andre Bishop.

Marty Bell, who was producing director at New Musicals and had commissioned “My Favorite Year,” also had moved on--to Toronto’s Livent Entertainment. Bell invited assorted New York show people to Toronto to meet Livent producer Garth Drabinsky and talk about possible projects. Among them were Flaherty and Ahrens, who played a few songs for a new musical they were writing at the time.

When Livent decided to audition composers and lyricists for “Ragtime,” its new musical based on E.L. Doctorow’s novel, Bell gave them a call. “Lynn is the most clearheaded lyricist I’ve ever worked with,” says Bell, now Livent senior vice president, creative affairs. “She manages to be simple and profound at the same time and never goes for the easy rhyme or slick joke; she always writes in character. And Steve is like a fountain of music--he can write every period and every style. And what’s great about them as a team is they are both composers and lyricists, so they’re hypercritical of each other’s work, and I think it produces terrific results.”

Ten songwriting teams received that call, asking them to write four songs over the next six weeks. (Bell says just two teams declined, both for scheduling reasons.) But Ahrens and Flaherty didn’t have six weeks--just 11 days scattered throughout the six-week period. As they worked day and night, Flaherty also drew on college experience playing ragtime for the Fleeting Moments Waltz and Quickstep Orchestra dance band.

Convinced they had to think big--”I didn’t think you were going to win the derby by small or safe choices,” Flaherty explains--they musicalized the first 30 pages of librettist Terrence McNally’s treatment into a 10-minute opening, called “Ragtime,” which is still in the show, as are their funeral dirge “Till We Reach That Day” and one of the immigrant Tateh’s songs. (Their fourth song was scrapped along with its story line.)

The songwriters were well into work on “Ragtime” when the phone rang again--this time to audition for “Anastasia. “We were all fans of ‘Once on This Island,’ ” says Fox Feature Films President Christopher Meledandri. “It had a wonderful spirit, in both the compositions and the lyrics. It drew you into the world of the piece so successfully that when we were thinking about the worlds of our movie, [which] encompasses Russia as well as Paris of the 1920s, we felt confident that they could take us into those worlds as successfully even though you couldn’t have more distinct backdrops.”

“Anastasia” executive producer Maureen Donley, herself a theater veteran, compares the creative process on “Anastasia” to a theatrical workshop, saying that in both “all the energy in the room is focused toward getting the best story pulled together.” She and other Fox executives knew Ahrens and Flaherty from working together on an earlier project in development at Disney, and the songwriting team participated in creating “Anastasia’s” outline as well as choosing the “song moments.”

“In musical theater and films, it’s almost as if you arrive at the edge of the river and need the song to ferry you across to the next part of the story,” says Robert Kraft, executive vice president at Fox Music. “With Flaherty and Ahrens, you aren’t even aware you’ve taken a trip until you get to the other side. It’s almost seamless the way they weave their songs into the narrative.”

They do that by staging songs not just in their heads but in their living rooms. “In the theater, we rarely write a song where somebody stands there and sings--it has to be quite a song to hold stage,” says Ahrens. “The same thing is true in the animated movie musical--you have to give the animator some active visual idea.”

Flaherty and Ahrens write at either her downtown loft or his place in the Murray Hill area, near the Morgan Library that figures so prominently in “Ragtime.” Sometimes they each work alone, faxing back and forth. But they usually improvise together. In Toronto on “Ragtime,” their first out-of-town show, they worked pretty much around the clock, but usually they get together around 10 a.m. and finish around 3:30 p.m.

On “Anastasia,” they’ve taken advantage of their new medium, writing songs that sweep across cities, even countries, between their opening and closing bars. The song where Anya/Anastasia is taught to act like a princess--what Flaherty calls their “Pygmalion sequence”--begins in Russia, continues at sea and concludes in France. “The great thing about writing for animation is that you can let your imagination go wild,” says Flaherty. “Whatever you can dream up, you can get on the screen.”

Some of their songs stayed essentially as first written, but others went through substantial changes, not all story related. Explains Ahrens: “The director needs something visual and has a specific idea in mind, story development people and writers want certain things, and producers have goals about who they want to reach. The head of music wants it to be a crossover song and not just work in the movie but go on AM radio. There’s a huge committee having input into what you’re writing.”

Ahrens analogizes the process to her earlier work on commercials--”you have a client and you write something based on their needs”--but both accentuate the positive. “The songs still sound like our songs,” says Flaherty, “and they really sound as if they’re sung by those characters in their unique voices. I think that’s the challenge--trying to be truthful to the character and emotion--but also balancing this whole other plate of issues that come into play.”

Flaherty and Ahrens are ready to take on another animated film, they say. “We’re proud of work we did on ‘Anastasia,’ of surviving the process and producing a score we think was good,” says Ahrens. “Our first love is the musical theater, but we want to always be open to whatever comes along. We haven’t really settled on something yet--’Ragtime’ is difficult to follow and so is ‘Anastasia.’ And we never like to repeat ourselves.”