High School Muscial Rocks in the OC
If you looked around the arena during “High School Musical: the Concert” on Friday and were surprised to see nearly everyone singing along to almost every song, well, you didn’t pay much attention to pop culture over the past year, did you?
For “High School Musical” was one of the biggest entertainment stories of 2006 – a blockbuster hit on the Disney Channel from the first of many times it aired, and with more than 3.6 million CDs sold, the best-selling album of the year.
Even if you’d never seen the movie or heard the songs – a possibility given the elementary-to-high-school audience it targeted – its popularity was so broad it would have been hard to miss.
So when the concert tour finally hit Honda Center in Anaheim on Friday, it was a dream come true for fans fortunate enough to score tickets to see their heroes in the singing-and-dancing flesh.
At 8 p.m. sharp the red curtain hiding the stage dropped to reveal the basketball scoreboard from the movie on a giant video-screen backdrop. As the scoreboard clock ticked down to zero, the band hit the first notes of “Start of Something New” and the crowd erupted in a deafening chorus of “OMG!-there-they-are!” screams.
Lead actress Vanessa Hudgens (”Gabriella”) – sang the show-opening duet with singer-songwriter Drew Seeley, a stand-in for costar Zac Efron (”Troy”), unavailable for the tour while he’s filming the upcoming movie musical adaptation of “Hairspray.”
Dancing around the pair on stage and singing backup on the song were costars Ashley Tisdale (”Sharpay”), Lucas Grabeel (”Ryan”), Corbin Bleu (”Chad”) and Monique Coleman (”Taylor”).
And for the next 90 minutes and 19 songs, the HSM fans in attendance got exactly what they wanted – the songs they know by heart, some solo material from Tisdale, Bleu and Hudgens, a steady flow of jokes and funky hats from Grabeel – all of it wrapped in a creatively choreographed stage show.
And that’s the thing about the Disney machine that created “High School Musical” – scoff all you want, cynics, and call it lightweight entertainment if you must, but the reason it’s been such a wild success is because it’s an almost perfectly crafted confection.
The songs are catchy pop with lyrics that hit the emotional marks that most everyone experiences in school. The stars are charismatically diverse. And the production values – everything from lights and sets to the dance numbers – provide a fun-to-watch stage show.
The second number – “Stick to the Status Quo” – neatly mixed the live action of the stars on stage in a school cafeteria setting with movie clips of the song and the cafeteria scene from the movie.
After Tisdale’s solo set, the lights came back up to reveal a row of gym lockers and basketball goal on stage. Six dancers – including Bleu and Seeley – burst out of the lockers, clad in Wildcat basketball uniforms to sing “Get’cha Head In the Game” while dancing with – and passing and shooting – basketballs in a nifty routine almost identical to the choreography of that song in the movie.
Grabeel popped on and off stage throughout the night, appearing as in the movie with a wild variety of hats – a rhinestone encrusted newsboy cap one moment, a bright red bowler the next – cracking jokes as he introduced each new segment.
Bleu – the It Boy of the moment, thanks to his starring role in “Jump In,” the Disney Channel’s current attempt to recapture the HSM lightning in a bottle – popped out on stage for his two songs (”Push It to the Limit,” and “Marching”) which featured perhaps more of his energetic dancing than his voice.
And Hudgens, who seemed the crowd’s biggest favorite all night, got an even bigger response for her three solo numbers, which included “Let’s Dance” and “Say OK,” dancing in a way that would have gotten Gabriella grounded if her mother in the movie had seen her shaking her hips that way.
The show wrapped up with a three-song set that featured all of what made “High School Musical” a success – the upbeat and fun “Bop to the Top” featuring Tisdale and Grabeel, the romantic ballad “Breaking Free,” a duet by Hudgens and Seeley, and a feel-good finale, “We’re All In This Together” by the full cast.
The message of that final number – no matter the differences, everyone can be on the same team – was perfectly clear if you looked away from the stage as it was sung. All manner of fans – the kindergartener across the aisle, a trio of teenage boys a few rows back, moms and daughters everywhere – were singing along.
And if a show makes that many people feel that good, you’d have to embrace the moment. After all, if the past year proved anything about “High School Musical” it’s probably that resistance is futile.
Entertainment Kids
Tags: High School Musical
