Turns out, even in a tale as old as time, there’s still room for improvement. For Disney’s upcoming live-action retelling of its animated classic Beauty and the Beast, which will find Emma Watson taking on the role of Belle opposite Dan Stevens’ Beast and Luke Evans’ Gaston, eight-time Oscar winner Alan Menken (who won two of those statuettes for his work on the original) found himself enlisted to write three new tunes for the project, alongside Sir Tim Rice.
Speaking at the Lincoln Center recently (via Stitch Kingdom), Menken revealed that the Disney pic will feature the music from the animated classic, not the Broadway adaptation, and he also spoke at length about two of the three new songs:
“It’s the songs from the movie, we did not fit in any songs [from the Broadway show]. The song I would have fit in from the Broadway show is ‘If I Can’t Love Her,’ but the Beast’s moment in the film is a much later moment, it would not be ‘if I can’t love her,’ it’s ‘I love her but -damn it- I’m letting her go.’ That lyric wouldn’t really work with that music. So we wrote another song called ‘Forever More,’ like ‘I now know what love is.’ There’s another song called ‘Days in the Sun’ which is a lullaby as all the objects and characters living in the castle are going to sleep they’re all singing about remembering before the spell. I think it’s gonna be a wonderful movie.”
Ian McKellen, Josh Gad, Kevin Kline, Emma Thompson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Ewan McGregor and Stanley Tucci co-star in the lavish adaptation, which Bill Condon (Mr. Holmes, Dreamgirls, Kinsey) is directing from a script by Perks of Being a Wallflower writer-director Stephen Chbosky.
Beauty and the Beast has been set for release on March 17, 2017.