From what I've read, I think it's not quite a question of melding the two (though the connection is certainly acknowledged), but more a case of Flaherty and Ahrens wanting to fix what they thought had gone wrong with the animated feature. Which I can understand, given the nature of the development process. It's perhaps notable that what everyone remembers about the 1997 film is, in fact, the music and its creators rather than the scripting -- even though the script as finally produced is in fact quite good for what it is, despite what were evidently a great many drafts and rewrites by numerous hands.