By Clay McNear
I (gulp!) teeter on the brink of being a High School Musical fan.
After enduring marathons of dreck like The Wiggles and the creepy Booba as the operating cost of being a dad, HSM seems like West Side Story, only, you know, not as good. The flick is bubbly and precocious, and even a little subversive in its way, sneaking a couple of life lessons past our youth’s finely tuned anti-message filter.
Musical’s subversive poster child is dog-faced beauty Ashley Tisdale, who’s blonde but not dumb. Tisdale’s theatrical portrayal of a stuck-up bitch is smart and spot-on, though her idiosyncrasies are predictably damped down in the leaden sequel, High School Musical 2. (Yep, I caught that one, as well. Do I get any credit for not having a choice?)
Here’s Disney’s core flaw: The studio may be the 800-pound gorilla of franchising, but unless the word “Pixar” is in the credits, it’s the 98-pound weakling of follow-through. HSM is the rule that proves there’s no exception. Originally a left-field hit on the Disney Channel, Musical now rivals Hannah Montana for sheer money-printing power. Since it’s impossible for Disney to screw up commodification on this scale, it mucks up everything that made the thing a commodity in the first place.
Doh!
Or perhaps it just spreads itself too thin.
Consider High School Musical: The Concert Tour.
High School Musical: The Ice Tour.
High School Musical: The Junior Novel.
The High School Musical: Sing It! video game.
The High School Musical: Get in the Picture reality-TV series.
The High School Musical 3: Senior Year big-screener, coming this fall to a multiplex near you.
High School Musical 4, now in the writing stages.
Finally, there’s Disney’s High School Musical, a nationally touring stage adaptation of the original that hits Gammage Auditorium for a six-day run beginning Tuesday, June 24. The production does not feature the original cast, which seems like an important distinction for discriminating quasi-fans like me but won’t mean squat to the franchise’s core audience of 8 to 14 year old girls. The reviews from other cities, all written by people who are not 8 to 14 year old girls, skew toward enthusiastic, which most likely means that they’re Disney apparatchiks. However, one writer, Jonathan Abarbanel of www.theatermania.com, captured, I think, why I didn’t have an epileptic seizure after the fifth straight viewing of the DVD: “High School Musical is something different for a Disney show; it's about real people in urban America, not about Africa or animals or mermaids. In fact, the show is resolutely old-fashioned in form.”
Old-fashioned? By jingy! If I had to be calf-roped and dragged screaming to the theater and held down in my seat by burly men with scars in order to watch a Broadway-style musical whose core appeal is to 8 to 14 year old girls, this would be it.
Showtimes are 7:30 p.m. June 24 through 27, 2 and 7:30 p.m. June 28, and 1 and 6:30 p.m. June 29. Gammage is located at 1200 South Forest Avenue in Tempe. Tickets range from $19.75 to $68. Call Ticketmaster at 480-784-4444 or check out Gammage Auditorium.
