Making ENCHANTED Sing… And Dance!

ENCHANTED is lucky to contain music and lyrics by the incomparable Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz. “I actually became involved with the film years ago,” says Menken, “when it was in the early stages of development. My active involvement picked up once again, in the fall of 2006. Stephen resumed our collaboration, which was a great opportunity for both of us to work together again.”

Schwartz supplies, “Alan called me and asked me if I’d be interested in doing the lyrics for this project. I read the screenplay, which I liked very much, and met with Kevin Lima and Chris Chase. It all meshed, and I felt very lucky to be able to climb aboard the train, even relatively late.”

The longtime collaborators and multiple Oscar® winners are very specific about what they look for in a project. Menken (who supplies the score and five original songs) explains, “Number one, you look for a story in which music can play a vital role. It’s got to have a style that allows the characters to sing and clearly for a project like this it starts in a world of animation, a world of enchantment, and then finds its way into the real world. It’s one of the best opportunities that I can think of for a new film score, because it can pull from the magic of animation and then move towards contemporary music in the same score.”

Schwartz reasons, “The biggest problem with doing live-action musicals is justifying why the characters are suddenly bursting into song in the middle of very real sets and very real situations. So one of the great things I thought about ENCHANTED was that the concept itself allowed the characters to sing in a way that was completely integral to the plot of the story.”

Of the new songs, three figure as sizeable set pieces: the “Happy Working Song” shows us Giselle utilizing her animal-charming abilities to help straighten out Robert’s messy bachelor apartment; “That’s How You Know” turns New York into an enormous stage, on which Giselle explains her ideas about true love to Robert and, in a grand Pied Piper fashion, brings more than 150 dancer and singers under her spell to perform a rousing production number that literally takes over Central Park; and “So Close,” which, sung by ”real world singer” Jon McLaughlin, mirrors Giselle’s inner, emotional journey. It is symbolic in the fact that she herself is not singing, given that she has matured from a recently-animated character to an emotionally sophisticated, flesh-and-blood woman and as we all know real people in our world don’t tend to break into song

As with all the filmmakers and cast, the Disney classics were a great influence for Menken and Schwartz. Per Menken: “We’re really trying to take you back to the ‘Snow White’ or ‘Cinderella’ era, pre-Belle, pre-Pinocchio, back to the earliest days of animation. The influence is so enormous—and the rest of the influence for me musically is almost innate—so my music becomes a marriage between the two.”

And Schwartz: “It’s really been fun both to pay homage to—and sort of gently kid—classic Disney… and we’re sort of kidding ourselves in a couple of spots, too! It’s definitely irreverent, and we’re definitely having fun with it, while still having great affection for it... and that just made it fun on all levels.”

Lima found working with the musical duo a dream come true. He says, “I feel really blessed to have the opportunity to work with Alan and Stephen. They are so perfectly suited to bringing the musical heart of Enchanted to life that I couldn’t imagine anyone else being able to do it. I’ve admired them all my life and to be in this moment working with them on something this special to me is a great joy.” Echoes Chase, “Alan and Stephen are a perfect example of how having great talents in your corner allows you to attack really challenging material. Nobody understands this kind of musical better than they do.”

The director began collaborating with the pair about nine months prior to the beginning of principal photography. Lima comments, “The songs take a road that echoes what Giselle is going through as a person. In the animated world, she breaks into song and no one cares. The animals all sing along. It’s as if that’s the normal way of living. But when she comes into the real world, and there’s no soundtrack, she needs to create her own soundtrack, in a sense, in this new place. Finally, as she becomes more human, the song leaves her throat and in the finale of the film the song is sung by someone on stage and ultimately becomes a voiceover song. What Alan and Stephen have written are five songs that cover her character arc perfectly.”

For producer Barry Josephson, it was this inclusion of the musical numbers that showed him the true magic at the heart of ENCHANTED. “I think that the first time I saw some rough cuts of the musical numbers and seeing them pieced together, that was a confirming moment for me. I mean, I had felt that throughout the process—seeing Amy so perfect in the role, of her speaking with the animals and working with the actors, how comfortable she was. But then, to see it all cut together—even roughly—that’s when I really said, ‘Wow, this is working.’ It’s that combination of a lot of things—the script, the direction, the performers, the design work, the effects, the music—that just blew me away. Then to have those wonderful musical pieces, where emotions are being generated and passed among everyone on camera… joy and passion. Alan and I were watching during the filming of ‘That’s How you Know’ in Central Park and we were both amazed. It just all really came together.”

Part of the joy also came from the fact that, even though they were aware that both Adams and Marsden could sing, the filmmakers were unprepared for the level of their musical accomplishment. Adams had been working in musical theater throughout her career, and Marsden spent some of his high school performing in choir and listening to Sinatra and classic crooners. Their melodious singing was given a final polish by vocal coach John Deaver, who worked with both prince and almost-princess on their vocal production. Chase remarked: “We hired Jimmy and Amy as actors, to then discover they were singers at this level was just a gift from heaven.”

And where would those big production numbers be without dancing? For choreographer John “Cha-Cha” O’Connell (2001 American Choreography for Film Award winner for “Moulin Rouge!”), ENCHANTED proved to be different from anything he’d ever worked on before. O’Connell comments, “The Central Park scenes were very different, in the sense that it has an incredible breadth of the type of talent that’s involved. It’s really Giselle’s number—she has a Pied Piper effect as she skips through the park and tells people her story, gathering groups up as she sings and dances through the scene. We have everything from anti-gravity gymnasts to stilt walkers and rollerbladers. We have authentic Bavarian slap dancers, Broadway dancers, children, and even a belly dancer—we’ve got everything in the mix. So it all adds up to a big universal eclectic number. And then for the ball scene, the highly-charged and very, very romantic finale of the film, I referenced all the animated Disney movies to get a sense of the type of waltzes they did. I looked at ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ They all have ballroom dances. And then, with our gorgeous music, we made our own choreography.

“Amy Adams and Idina Menzel come from musical theater backgrounds, so their skills were totally serendipitous. They took to the dances like ducks to water. Patrick had done a little bit of dancing when he was in his early 20’s. And Jimmy Marsden hadn’t danced at all, but now, he’s a champion waltzer. You kind of sculpt according to what they can do. And because they’re actors, they absolutely know how to sell it, which is very important and half the battle,” concludes O’Connell.

For Lima, being able to helm a new take on a Disney-style fantasy was not dissimilar to the journey experienced by the central character of Giselle, who straddles two worlds—the director, however, got to re-visit his boyhood world and re-imagine it from the viewpoint of an adult filmmaker.

But it is, above all else, a love of all that is Disney that drove the director during the journey of ENCHANTED: “I think that’s what ‘Mary Poppins’ did when it came out—it reminded you of what you loved about the Disney animated films, and then transported that into a real world. And I think this movie does a lot of the same thing; it takes all of those iconic ideas and puts them in a new context. That’s where the joy of the movie really comes from—it’s the sense of discovery, that as an audience member, you get to look at it and think, ‘Oh, now they’re doing this!’”

Lima expands on his thought and closes, “It really feels like—although we’re doing what Walt did back with ‘Mary Poppins’—we’re pioneering forward with today’s technology and storytelling of our modern world while, at the same time, we’re able to speak to something that’s pure and wonderful. In many ways—and this may sound corny—the world doesn’t have enough of this. I think that the notion of true love, of a sense of naïveté, and the belief that you don’t have to be cynical to live in today’s world is something that’s important to remember and it’s something that Walt Disney said in every single one of his movies.”

Walt Disney Pictures Presents ENCHANTED, A Barry Sonnenfeld – Josephson Entertainment Production, starring Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, James Marsden, Timothy Spall, Idina Menzel and Susan Sarandon. The music supervisor is Dawn Soler. The songs are by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz, with a score by Menken. The costume designer is Mona May. The film is edited by Stephen A. Rotter and Gregory Perler. The production designer is Stuart Wurtzel; the director of photography is Don Burgess. The executive producers are Chris Chase, Sunil Perkash and Ezra Swerdlow. ENCHANTED is written by Bill Kelly, produced by Barry Josephson and Barry Sonnenfeld, and directed by Kevin Lima. Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.