Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Got it Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size 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’ is 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, an.