Chapter 130
The Soundtrack of Our Lives

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(Originally posted January 5, 2014)

A moment later, Tim O’Day reintroduced Alan Menken (cue another thunderous standing ovation).

Rather than wasting any time talking, Menken sat down at the piano and immediately broke into a Little Mermaid medley.

Now, while I love the music of the Sherman brothers, I feel like Alan Menken truly wrote the soundtrack to my childhood, so I was on cloud nine listening to him sing his songs.

He also went chronologically (for the most part), and every time he would finish singing songs from one movie we know and love, he would move onto another classic. Several of the true Disney classics were bunched together at the beginning of the performance, since The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin were all done back-to-back.

I will forever stand by the fact that the song “Beauty and the Beast” is one of my favorite pieces of music ever written, so when he sang that tune I immediately got goosebumps. After singing songs from the film version of Beauty and the Beast, he went into a few tunes from the Broadway musical. One of the most impressive feats I have ever witnessed was one man singing “Human Again”—a massive chorus number, which left him sweating and breathless by the end (though he never missed a note). He then followed up that song with “If I Can’t Love Her,” which is equally difficult.

If there’s one thing I noticed about Menken’s performance (as a former student of musical theatre), it’s just how incredible well he sang his own very difficult songs. They are all in a really high register, they are all hard songs for anyone to sing, and he rattled them all off back-to-back for more than an hour, making them all sound great.

After Beauty and the Beast, Menken sang songs and told stories from Aladdin and then Newsies.

Of course, next chronologically came Pocahontas and Hunchback of Notre Dame—two of my favorite underappreciated movies. I’ll admit that I thoroughly teared up hearing renditions of the lovely songs “If I Never Knew You” from Pocahontas and “Out There” from Hunchback (always two of my all-time favorites).

At times it truly felt as if the hits couldn’t keep coming, but then another movie would pop up on the screen that I’d forgotten about. We heard songs from Hercules, Enchanted, and Tangled before we knew the night must be coming to an end soon.

After wrapping up his portion, of course the encores had to begin, so Tim O’Day welcomed both legends back out onto the stage—the standing ovations just kept coming.

In a wonderfully cheesy moment, both composers asked each other whether they had ever written a “song about the world.” Menken, who had skipped one of his most enduring classics earlier in the show, responded by singing “A Whole New World.”

Next, he turned the question around to Sherman, who responded by singing perhaps the most famous song in the world (which also happens to be ABOUT the world): “It’s a Small World.” For the first time all night, the two legends sang together in counterpoint before asking the audience to join in for the chorus. It was a moment filled with laughter and joy, and it was the perfect way to end the perfect night.

Getting up from our seats, it’s hard to put into words how I felt at that moment. The whole experience had been one I will never forget. I felt like I had my entire life played before me in song by the men who wrote the soundtrack. I owe so much to Menken and Sherman. Not only did their songs shape my love for Disney in my youth, but they also shaped my love for musicals—which defined the course my life took for about 20 years.

I could continue to wax on about the concert for ages and never really perfectly sum it up, so I’ll just say that we both left with giant smiles on our faces and the feeling that this was right where we were meant to be. We also once again noted that this one event would have been worth the entire cost of admission to the Expo, so we felt like we got a smokin’ deal.

On a bit of a sad note, however, the end of the concert also marked the end of our Expo experience this year. At the time when we decided not to buy tickets for Sunday, none of the Imagineering panels had been announced yet, so we looked at the schedule and thought it seemed a little light on content to really be worth spending more money we really didn’t have. In retrospect, I’m still not sure if I’m disappointed or not that we didn’t get tickets for that third day. I think a lot of the panels sounded like they were really interesting in the end, but we were EXHAUSTED after Saturday, so I can’t imagine doing it all again on Sunday and then being ready for work on Monday. I think for the 2015 Expo—which we will ABSOLUTELY be attending—we will go to all three days and then take off the day after to recuperate. Without a doubt, we decided that the Expo is a must-do from now on. It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had as a Disney fan, and I’m so happy we decided to see what all the fuss was about.

Despite the fact that we were very tired after the concert, our night actually wasn’t over. We wanted to go to the Touring Plans meetup at DCA (even though we had already missed a decent portion of it because the concert had run VERY long). First we had to run back to our car to drop off all the memorabilia and souvenirs we’d acquired throughout the day, and then from there we took the Toy Story bus to the parks.

Heading into DCA as it was just about to close, we were very much walking against the crowds. We made it back to Cars Land and went to the seating outside of Flo’s V8 Cafe, where a decently-sized crowd still remained. Some of the folks we’d already met at previous events were there, including the Selgas, Naomi, Nicole and Jim. We also got to meet the infamous Len Testa as well as several others, including a guy named Dave from Arizona, who I talked to for a while. We were definitely among the last ones to arrive because I think we were the only ones who went to the concert. There were several plates of food for us to pick and choose from because Len had bought enough entrees from Flo’s to feed a small army. Tracy and I had never been here before (and we were hungry), so we loaded up on some pork, turkey, mashed potatoes, and other fixings, and we ate ravenously while we chatted with everyone.

The meet lasted maybe a half-hour longer after we got there, and then people started getting up to go their separate ways. We stayed until we were among the last ones there, and then we walked to the front of the park with Guy, Jen, and a couple other stragglers. Pausing outside the DCA gates, we thought about possibly going into Disneyland to get dessert or else heading over to the Anabella Hotel, where MiceChat was having a gathering with lots of people (including some Disney Legends). In the end, we decided not really to do anything else on the night. Instead, we just stood outside DCA chatting with the remaining Touring Plans folks for about a half-hour. Guy and Jen jokingly talked about bringing their dog Koko (who has become a bit of an Internet sensation in her own right) to do a “meetup” the next day, and we immediately jumped onboard. We said if they could arrange a Koko Meet, we would be there.

Finally, as the cast members were finishing shutting down DCA, we all went our separate ways. Tracy and I took the Toy Story bus back to the lot, drove home, and went straight to bed.

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