As far as I’m concerned, there are two movie subgenres that always work. For instance, I’ve never seen a French Foreign Legion movie that I didn’t think was terrific—for me, Beau Geste ranks alongside The Thin Man, His Girl Friday, Angels With Dirty Faces and 42nd Street as one of the most gloriously entertaining “Hollywood classics” ever made.
Speaking of 42nd Street, the other type of movie I adore is the backstage comedy. I’m a sucker for any movie about people putting on a play—especially if the climax of the plot takes place on opening night, where the whole rickety, underrehearsed production miraculously comes together in front of a live audience. I thought the people who felt Saving Private Ryan should have won the Oscar instead of Shakespeare in Love were out of their minds. It was no contest: Shakespeare was a much more emotional experience.
All this is a long-winded explanation for why I turned on the Disney Channel this week and willingly sat through an entire broadcast of the made-for-TV movie High School Musical. I’ve been curious about the High School Musical phenomenon for a while now—at a time when albums by Paul Simon, Pearl Jam and Prince were tanking, the High School Musical soundtrack was number one on the Billboard charts. At one point, five of the top 10 iTunes downloads were High School Musical songs. High School Musical may be the hottest pop-culture property on the market that most adults have never heard of. (The Cheetah Girls, whose upcoming, horrible-looking TV-movie was plugged relentlessly throughout the High School Musical broadcast I watched, may run a close second.)
In fact, for the longest time, I was under the impression that High School Musical was some kind of reality TV program about actual teenagers rehearsing an actual high school play. That might actually be a great premise for a reality show, but when I found out High School Musical was actually an original musical conceived specifically for tween audiences, I wasn’t too upset—hey, you can never have too many backstage comedies, right?
Except I was wrong again. Bizarrely, High School Musical never actually gets backstage—it’s the only putting-on-a-show musical I can think of that climaxes during the audition process. The actual show that the characters will eventually perform is the merest of afterthoughts.
Which brings me to the second strange thing about this movie: it doesn’t seem to like musicals all that much. Its most unlikable characters, in fact, are precisely the ones whose lives revolve around the stage. The drama teacher is a pompous prig who keeps delivering insufferable monologues about the wonders of theatre, and the villains are Ryan and Sharpay, a brother-and-sister act who’ve played the leads in every musical they’ve ever tried out for but whose cloying, jazz-hands performing style represents a regime that the movie argues must be forcibly overthrown.
But not with show tunes! Sharpay may refer the mousy girl who’s written the score of the musical-within-the-Musical “my sawed-off Sondheim,” but in fact the film’s soundtrack consists mostly of undistinguished, squeaky-clean bubblegum pop tunes whose obvious melodies and lyrics studiously avoid even a whiff of Broadway sophistication. (That said, a couple of the uptempo numbers are inanely catchy, especially the one where the squeak of gym shoes on the basketball court morphs into the song’s rhythm track. It’s a little corny, sure, but when Björk does the same trick in Dancer in the Dark, people call her a genius.)
However, High School Musical’s true commercial genius, I think, lies elsewhere. The film’s heroes, you see, are Troy, a star basketball player, and Gabriella, a math whiz, both of whom possess tremendous hidden singing abilities and who horrify their friends by deciding to try out for the school’s annual musical. The film is very American in the way it claims to be about nonconformity but it’s really about winning: the conflict comes during the callback process, as Sharpay and Ryan scheme to foil the threat Troy and Gabriella pose to their precious social role. In other words, like American Idol, High School Musical has found a way to portray the process of performing and creating art not as an end in itself but as just one more big competition (“Who will win the audition?”), no different from a basketball game or a math contest.
A Broadway version of High School Musical is scheduled to debut next year, and Disney has also approved a version designed for school theatre groups. I shudder to think of the armies of real-life Sharpays and Ryans out there who will be trying out for the lead roles. And winning them. (August 31, 2006)
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