West End Stars Join BBC Proms Celebration of Alan Menken's Disney Music
Six West End performers will sing the songs of Alan Menken at the Royal Albert Hall on Monday 31 August, as the BBC Proms devotes a full concert to the composer behind some of Disney's most familiar film scores.
The concert, titled "Enchanted: Alan Menken's Music for Disney," begins at 7pm and features the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra alongside the National Youth Music Theatre. Sarah Hicks conducts, with Rupert Hands as stage director (What's On Stage).
The line-up draws from across the West End. Stewart Clarke, Ben Forster, Lucie Jones, Sam Oladeinde, Celinde Schoenmaker and Marisha Wallace are the six soloists. Jones is known for playing Elphaba in Wicked and Elle Woods in Legally Blonde; Wallace starred as Effie White in Dreamgirls; Clarke was recently in The Merchant of Venice at the Globe. Between them they cover musical theatre, pop and stage drama.
The programme spans nine films: Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Pocahontas, Hercules, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tangled, Enchanted and Newsies. Several of those titles also became stage musicals, and Menken has written for both mediums across a career of more than four decades.
Menken is one of only 22 people worldwide to have won at least one Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony — the competitive quartet known informally as an EGOT (BBC Media Centre). His Disney scores alone have produced multiple Academy Award winners, from "Under the Sea" to the title song of Beauty and the Beast.
Tickets for the concert are on sale now through the BBC Proms and Royal Albert Hall websites. The Proms also holds back a batch of £8 "Promming" tickets — the standing-room tradition that gives the festival its name — released on the day of the performance from 9.30am. Those go quickly for high-profile evenings.
For anyone without a seat or outside London, the concert will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Sounds on 31 August. A filmed version airs on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer on Saturday 5 September at 5.30pm.
The Menken Prom sits inside the BBC Proms 2026 season, which presents 86 concerts over eight weeks at the Royal Albert Hall and other venues. The season runs through the summer and mixes orchestral classics with themed evenings drawn from film, television and musical theatre (BBC Media Centre). Two further Menken-related BBC concerts also feature in the wider season: a "Disney's Greatest Hits" event with the BBC Concert Orchestra at which the composer is expected to appear on stage, and "The Songs of Alan Menken" at Milton Court with West End singers Jenna Lee James and Michael Xavier (BBC; BBC Concert Orchestra).
For musical-theatre fans, the 31 August Prom is the headline event. A full orchestra, six stage-tested voices and the songbook that defined a generation of animated film, all in one evening.
