Melissa Manchester has composed popular song hits, won Grammys, concertized widely and starred in Broadway shows, but she’s now written what is virtually her first book musical with the score for Disney’s “Lady and the Tramp II,” a lively, charming sequel to the beloved 1955 animated classic that’s now available on video shelves and DVD counters. Manchester, who recently visited Dallas in connection with the video’s release, had previously penned a single song for Disney “The Great Mouse Detective” in 1986, but she was surprised to be approached about writing a series of melodies for a follow-up to a classic which she described as “one of my favorites–the characters are so lovingly written.” She’d written a musical called “I Sent a Letter to My Love” which was being done in workshop in Indiana, and after it came to the attention of Disney producers, they approached her to do the “Lady” score in collaboration with Oscar-winning lyricist Norman Gimbel. When she signed on, the story of Scamp, the free-spirited pup of Lady and Tramp, was only in first draft, so she and Gimbel were brought into script meetings early on and could participate in shaping the material. “Norman and I took the script and had strong feelings about where the songs should be,” she recalled. “And as the songs were written, the script was reshaped” to accommodate them. “Your job is to help define and refine the moment, and create a musical voice for all the characters,” Manchester explained. “The songs…underscore the events [in the story].”

What especially attracted Manchester to the project was the producers’ commitment to be faithful to the tone and appearance of the original while giving the story a moral that contemporary audiences could relate to. “They brought some of the original animators back,” she explained, and “didn’t want [the songs] to be bogusly modern. But they [also] tried to make the story relevant to today’s families. It’s about family, about a kid making choices in the face of peer pressures.”

The range of the songs Manchester and Gimbel have contributed to “Lady and the Tramp II” is wide, from a big opening number (“Welcome Home”) that establishes the era and the atmosphere and a yearning anthem for Scamp (“World Without Fences”), to a romantic duet for Scamp and his girlfriend Angel (“I Didn’t Know I Could Feel This Way”) and a show-stopping production number sung by Scamp and his new acquaintances of the streets (“Junkyard Society Rag”), which Manchester noted “could have been choreographed by Bob Fosse.” But the songstress was particularly proud of the ballad “Always There,” not only because it encapsulates the movie’s theme but because she had to fight for it. Sung by Scamp, Angel, Lady and Tramp, it’s what Manchester, using Broadway parlance, termed an “eleventh-hour song,” a number coming near the close of a show that the audience expects to sum up what the whole story is about. “At first [the writers and diretors] didn’t want a song for that spot,” Manchester remembered, but she and Gimbel strongly felt that a number about the importance of family was absolutely essential there. So they wrote the piece and fought for its inclusion–and won. Manchester was vindicated when a sneak preview of the completed film was held and the song proved a smash. “I try not to gloat,” she said, laughing. But you can tell she’s proud to have won that one, and viewers will be glad she did. They’ll also be glad that they decided to catch “Lady and the Tramp II,” one of the rare direct-to-video titles that wouldn’t be out of place on a theatre screen.

C

It’s surely a virtue to be open to artistic expressions from cultures other than one’s own, so it’s undoubtedly valuable that Lot 47 Films has decided to release the South Korean “Chunhyang,” from prolific director Im Kwon Taek, in this country. In terms of narrative, the film offers a traditional Korean tale which intermingles moralistic praise of wifely fidelity on the one hand and good royal government on the other (indeed, it implies that the two are comparable in ethical terms). However, it couches its presentation of the story within the framework of a sung performance of it by a histrionic declaimer (Hong Kyung Yeun) who’s accompanied by a drummer (Kim Hyung Hwan); this is the form of Korean solo opera known as pansori, which might best be compared to Celtic bardic practice, although one might also see it as similar to the ancient Greek poetic tradition centered on figures like Homer or even the more recent African habit of maintaining a local historical record through the music-like recitation of memorized past accounts by local figures of the sort that Alex Haley encountered in writing “Roots.”

“Chunhyang” begins with Hong singing rhythmically (without subtitles) on a near-barren stage, with Kim’s drum striking the accents or beats of the verse. The effect isn’t dissimilar from rap, although the extraordinarily pungent, emphatic style of declamation will strike western ears as more wailing than vocalizing. We then segue into the story–shot in lush, colorful hues on large sets boasting big crowds when appropriate–of a young governor’s son who falls in love with (and secretly weds) Chunhyang, the beautiful daughter of a local courtesan, only to be torn away from her when his father is transferred to Seoul and he must also go there to take his government exams. She promises him fidelity and he pledges to return; but no sooner has he left than the cruel new governor demands the girl’s services. When she refuses, the governor brutally abuses her while his henchmen loot the countryside. We’re told that three years pass, during which Chunhyang suffers terribly in her Penelope-like fidelity while her husband aces his test and becomes a chief royal minister. Happily, he’s sent back to the district, disguised as a beggar, to investigate the governor’s conduct in office, arriving in time to save his wife and reestablish honest rule in the king’s name. This is obviously a simple folk-tale exalting both feminine integrity and enlightened royal rule, and it’s played that way, with stilted acting and very schematic dramaturgy. But throughout it’s also periodically interrupted by our return to the pansori-singer telling the tale onstage before a rapt and emotional audience; and we often hear his insistent narration of events overlaid upon depictions of the scenes he’s describing.

All of this is dramatically rather curious and off-putting. The purely visual portion of the picture has a certain beauty and visceral power, even if it’s staged more woodenly than might suit western taste. (The fable, to be perfectly honest, has less depth and subtlety than Disney’s “Mulan,” and the performances embody a quasi-operatic style that’s sometimes almost humorously obvious.) But intersplicing the pansori segments makes for a very peculiar hybrid. After all, the entire point of pansori is that the recitation is complete in itself, with no need for extraneous imagery; the dramatic use of the voice, which often tries to simulate the effect of the mood or object it describes, surely points to this. Adding cinematic representations to what’s being told by the bard thus seems rather untrue to the premises of his artistry. On the other hand, the narration often needlessly reinforces what we’re shown on the screen, telling us the characters’ moods, for instance, or describing a scene that’s been recreated by the production designers; the effect is redundant, but even worse it seems to betray the filmmakers’ fear that their dramatization isn’t successful on its own. In other words, by trying to meld the two art forms, “Chunhyang” doesn’t seem very true to either; imagine, if you will, a movie of Homer’s “Odyssey” which was punctuated by a white-haired fellow in a toga reciting Greek verses from the poem, or an adaptation of one of Jane Austen’s novels periodically interrupted by shots of the author scribbling words in her notebook or someone reading fragments of the text which were then replicated on the screen. The effect would be jarring, and though the analogy isn’t perfect, Im’s attempt to meld pansori with images on film isn’t entirely satisfactory either.

So “Chunhyang” remains, for all its cultural interest, at best a cinematic curiosity which only those with the most rarified tastes will want to sample.