One of the intriguing influences of Lin-Manuel Miranda upon the Disney musical model is the stylistic evolution that Moana and Encanto brought to the table in the late 2010's and early 2020's. The more traditional, formulaic approach set forth by Alan Menken and those before him was waning, though Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez struck a popular balance between the two approaches with their Frozen songs. Michaels and her associates definitely take the Miranda path, but they cannot emulate the catchiness of his songs nor the cleverness of his lyrics. Every song in Wish is a disappointment, even the two (why two?) ballads, "This Wish" and "A Wish Worth Making." There are several reasons for this failure, but the most foundational is the length of each melodic line within the songs. The songwriters force too much lyrical action into each stanza, the long lines causing the melodies to become lost in the process. Miranda sometimes flirted with this danger in Encanto, but Michaels takes the whirlwind constructs even further and makes her songs incomprehensible and unmemorable in the process. Not even the ballads offer a catchy few bars that kids can sing on the way out of the theatre, and the setting and villain songs range from generic to obnoxious. The vocal performances by the two leads, Ariana DeBose and Chris Pine, are fine, though Pine's attempt to mirror Dwayne Johnson's infection and personality in Moana's "You're Welcome" lands with a thud. The ensemble cast's songs often throw the supplemental vocals at the mix in abrasive ways, creating a level of annoying dissonance you don't often hear in these musicals. Some of this issue of unwieldy group vocals owes the inartful underlying constructs they are performing, some of them taking popular fragments from Lopez and Anderson-Lopez's songs to silly extremes. Also not to be underestimated is just how obviously awful the lyrics are in these songs. The attribution for these lyrics points squarely to Michaels, and they are embarrassingly ridiculous at times. It's bad enough that the voices are performing in obnoxious inflections over juvenile structures; the addition of the lyrics causes at least half of these songs to be painfully unlistenable. The line late in the mindbogglingly hideous "I'm a Star" that states "Ooh, I'm a star / Watch out world, here I are" is among worst single moments in Disney's long history of musicals. (Do they think kids are total grammatical idiots?) With the songs struggling badly throughout Wish, the score by Dave Metzger becomes the only marginal attraction.

Metzger has long been an orchestrator in the animated realm, partnering with Mark Mancina and John Powell for decades and accompanying Alan Silvestri through his Marvel scores. He finally joined Alan Menken with Disenchanted. More importantly, he had orchestrated the Moana and Frozen scores and written original music for the Tarzan and Brother Bear sequels and a short 2023 film about the history of Disney animation. A cynic could say that Metzger was the budget option for Wish, but career orchestrators like him often deserve such big breaks into the limelight. One of the truly odd aspects of this soundtrack, though, is the total disconnect between the songs and score. Metzger was well aware of the necessary blend of the two and stated as much, but that didn't stop the Michaels song recordings from barely exuding any of the orchestral personality of the score. Instead, the songs take a much more contemporary route, their distinctly modern pop approach not emulated in more than one token comedy passage in the score. The inability of the songs to enunciate their own melodies makes their incorporation into the score almost moot. A five-note phrase from "This Wish" opens the score and a variant from "A Wish Worth Making" features prominently late in "A Wish Returns," "The Journey Calls," and "Rosas Finale." (It doesn't help that several songs use similar five-note phrasing.) Other connections are fleeting at best, the theme chosen by Metzger for "The Kingdom of Rosas," "Rosas Celebration," and "Rosas Finale" not cleanly matching the melodies of the setting "Welcome to Rosas" song. He chose Mediterranean instrumentation only for these bookending cues; the acoustic guitar, castanets, and finger cymbals don't adequately flavor the remainder of the generically orchestral work. There's nothing particularly offensive about the score aside from the atrocious "The Happy Chicken Song," but the work is so terribly mundane that it emulates some of the most auto-pilot John Debney equivalents. Without a strong basis of themes from the songs or its own ranks, the score meanders through all the expected Mickey Mousing, faux choral fantasy, and bubbly enthusiasm, but there's no dramatic heft to any of it. A very dry recording quality doesn't help, the female vocal in "Consulting the Spellbook" a rare exception in ambience. The score is only available on the longer of two album variants, though listeners won't hear the movie's references to Leigh Harline's iconic song "When You Wish Upon a Star" on any product. In the end, Wish is perhaps Disney's biggest musical dud since Hercules, a structurally and stylistically devoid entry and an exhibit of just how wretched Disney lyrics can get.   @Amazon.com: CD or Download