Sister Act became a musical, but someone forgot to tell Whoopi Goldberg

While award-winning composer Alan Menken was working on music for a theatrical adaptation of the 1992 movie, Sister Act, he was invited to lunch at then-New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s apartment, just off Fifth Avenue. Around the table were many of the who’s who of New York’s arts scene, and they were invited to share or speak about their work or current projects.

“Various artists got up and talked or performed, so I got up … and said, ‘Oh, I’m adapting a musical of Sister Act’. And I hear a voice in the crowd go, ‘What?’”

That “what” was delivered in a nasal rasp, familiar to anyone who has seen a comedy any time in the 1980s or ’90s. “That’s when I met Whoopi for the first time.”

Whoopi Goldberg and Alan Menken in New York in March. Credit: Getty Images

Whoopi, of course, was Whoopi Goldberg, the star of the comedy about a Motown singer who hides out in a convent and teaches her fellow nuns a thing or two about music – and fun. It spawned a sequel, also starring Goldberg, but the fact that it was being turned into a stage musical was a surprise to her. She loved the concept and became a producer of the show, eventually playing the role of Mother Superior during its West End incarnation.

“She had very specific ideas, and Whoopi was very much a valuable barometer in terms of how far we go with the humour, how far we go with creating characters and the racial touchstones of the time in a way that would be effective and funny but definitely be shy of the boundary of being upsetting or controversial,” Menken says.

Menken had his own ideas about what would work best for the musical. In the movie, Goldberg’s Deloris Van Cartier is a Nevada lounge singer who teaches the nuns to sing 1950s and ’60s Motown, which was the music that comprised her act.

“Part of my hesitancy was, having written Little Shop of Horrors, which really pulls on R&B and Motown and those styles, I felt like it was going to sit in the same vein and same genre, and I said, ‘I really would like to give it its own world’,” says Menken.

He decided to bring the musical into the world of 1970s disco. “That was such a party time, in terms of music. And for that to be the underscore for something that’s really about religion and also love and attachments would give it a lot of heart and a lot of humour as well. That really worked out well.”

When the show starts its Australian run in August, it will star Casey Donovan as Deloris Van Cartier, Genevieve Lemon as Mother Superior and Rhonda Burchmore as Sister Mary Lazarus.

Menken says when he’s setting out to write a musical, whether it’s The Little Mermaid (for which he won two Oscars), Beauty and the Beast (ditto), Aladdin (yes, two more) or Pocahontas (OK, this is getting ridiculous – “after that, I think everyone behind the scenes said, ‘Enough! Enough Menken!’”), he needs to have a sense of the setting, time period and tone of the story before he begins.

“The nightmare assignment would be somebody saying, ‘Oh, write whenever you want’,” Menken says.

Sister Act is among a string of hit musicals that gave Menken entry into the exclusive show-business club of 19 people to have achieved EGOT status, having won Emmys, Grammys, Oscars and a Tony award (coincidentally, Goldberg is another member of the club). His dedication to character and story is coupled with the ability to write songs that will stick in your head for oh, 30 years (“Look at this stuff, isn’t it neat ...” “Little town, it’s a quiet village ...” “Well, Ali Baba had them 40 thieves ...”).

He also has seven Golden Globes, an Olivier, a Drama Desk and so many other assorted bits of hardware it would be impossible to list them all within this article. But there’s one award that he particularly likes to bring up. He won a “Razzie”, or a Golden Raspberry Award, for worst original song, for High Times, Hard Times, from the 1992 movie musical, Newsies. He learnt about his Razzie on the same night he won his first two Oscars, for best original score and best original song (Under the Sea) for The Little Mermaid, a head-spinning confluence.

Casey Donovan as Deloris Van Cartier and Genevieve Lemon as Mother Superior in the Australian production of Sister Act.Credit: Benny Capp

Newsies, with a budget of $US15 million ($22.5 million), was one of Disney’s biggest flops, taking in a paltry $US2.8 million at the box office. But in the never-ending quest for content, the studio turned it into a stage musical in 2011, with Menken again writing the music. It won him his first Tony – but High Times, Hard Times was cut from the stage version.

“People get really attached to that story and those songs and those characters, and it’s not dissimilar to Hercules to a great degree, which also has gone through a similar evolution where people have just fallen in love with those Muses and the characters. We’ve really emphasised that direction in the new stage musical.”

Hercules is currently playing in Europe and is intended for the West End and ultimately Broadway. “And of course, Australia, please,” Menken says.

‘The audience is your last collaborator. [It] tells you things, like hmm, they didn’t really respond to that. OK, throw it away.’

Alan Menken, composer

Asking a composer to name their favourite work is a bit like asking a parent to name their favourite child, but Menken does let slip he is particularly partial to The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which was considered too dark by many critics in 1996 but has been reconsidered recently as one of the Disney greats. That movie, too, spawned a stage show, which became one of the longest-running musicals in Berlin but did not move to Broadway. That isn’t to say, however, that it won’t. After all, even Deloris Van Cartier got back in the habit.

Menken enjoys composing for both film and theatre, but he says the response of a live audience can be invaluable.

“The construction is a joy when you get it right. It can be an agony if you’re not getting it right or if there’s something that’s not quite working about it,” he says. “There’s differences between the mediums ... In the case of Sister Act … it’s the same story, but it varies in many different ways, emphasises different aspects and brings different things to the fore ... The audience is your last collaborator. You put it on the stage, and the audience tells you things, like hmm, they didn’t really respond to that. OK, throw it away, let’s try something else.”

The process of creating a musical is intensely collaborative, and Menken has worked with some of the best in the business, including fellow EGOT holder Tim Rice and another composer who has long been a fan of Menken’s work and now happens to be the world’s most famous musical theatre writer.

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Alan Menken during the Broadway season of Hamilton in 2015. Credit: Getty Images

“My niece, my sister’s daughter, went to the Hunter School in New York, and her classmate was a little boy named Lin-Manuel Miranda. And Lin was obsessed with The Little Mermaid, she would tell me about Lin and that Lin loved The Little Mermaid so much and blah, blah, blah.

“We were embarking on the live action Little Mermaid, and Sean Bailey, who was head of production at Walt Disney Pictures at the time, read an interview with Lin where Lin talked about what Mermaid meant to him. So without even telling me, he went to Lin and said, ‘Would you like to work on this?’”

Menken says that erstwhile little boy proved to be a fantastic collaborator. “We got to go back into that together and reinvent it,” he says.

Sister Act the Musical opens at Sydney’s Capitol Theatre in August, at Melbourne’s Regent Theatre in November and at Brisbane’s QPAC in February. Tickets on sale at http://sisteractthemusical.com.au