Disney’s High School Musical

Published Tuesday 29 January 2008 at 14:30 by Mark Shenton

From its modest origins as a Disney satellite channel TV movie, first aired just two years ago, Disney’s High School Musical has become an unstoppable juggernaut. It has already spawned a sequel (whose soundtrack was remarkably the bestselling album in any genre last year), with part three now in production. It has also become an ice show (already on the road - or rink - in the UK) and even an inevitable video game.

A stage version was released for amateur productions, which are proliferating faster than any musical in history (one of which I already saw at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe). And now - after a professional US tour that began last summer - Stage Entertainment have joined forces with Disney to tour it professionally in the UK as well. On the same day that the tour opened in Bromley, a second production was announced to open at London’s Hammersmith Apollo in June.

It’s nothing short of a phenomenon, and watching the highly energetic, all-American spectacle unfolding on the stage, it’s not difficult to see why. This is like a cross between Grease and the Kids from Fame for the tweenies market. It is as bloodless, sexless and unthreatening as it is possible to get - yet also sweetly (and only occasionally cloyingly) conveying a moral message that tells its audience not to allow themselves be boxed in by other people’s perceptions of them or put limits on what they want to do.

As in Grease, the two lead characters meet on holiday - in this case, snowboarding - and then find themselves at the same school, with Rydell High swapped here for the even more generic East High School. But as their romance plays out here, it makes Grease seem like Trainspotting. Troy, the jock, and Gabrielle, the swot, have to wrestle with the expectations of their peers (and in Troy’s case, those of his dad, too, who coaches the school basketball team he is the star of) to fulfil their dream of starring in the high school musical.

It’s not exactly King Lear - though the musical version they’re producing is a feminist rewrite of Romeo and Juliet called Juliet and Romeo that we are mercifully spared having to watch. The drama teacher, Ms Darbus, tells her class that that in the theatre you have to allow yourself to take risks - the show itself hardly follows the same advice. But in its utterly clean-cut, wholesome way, it does something else: it is introducing an entire new generation to musical theatre.

The current cinema release of Sweeney Todd may be revealing the adult possibilities for the genre, but younger audiences have got to start somewhere else. This show connects to youthful audiences in an oddly appealing way, and the young cast of Jeff Calhoun’s fast production give it their all. The generic pop ballads are soulfully performed by Ashley Day and Lorna Want, and there’s athletic dancing from a busy ensemble, with Lee Honey-Jones’ Ryan being a particularly nifty mover.