Chilling News About Disney’s ‘High School Musical’
OK, relax. It’s a headline trick to catch your attention - there’s nothing actually wrong with the High School Musical craze.
Yes, that’s right, I said craze. While it may be considered this generation’s Grease, and while Zac Efron may be the new John Travolta, it’s kind of like the story about Katie Holmes on Broadway - at a certain point you just reach media saturation, and it seems that everything that can be written has been. Which is why I’ve not written much about the High School Musical, or the sequel.
However, something happened this morning as I was in the grocery store, getting some toiletries and some breakfasty stuff: I saw a tiny stand featuring the HSM logo. Selling nail polish. Several different sets, in fact, presumably based on the different cliques.
It set off a dissonance in me. I’m thinking of this as, well, a musical. I think of it on Broadway, and usually you don’t see Broadway shows lending their names to trinkets in the grocery stores. But Disney has changed the rules of the game, you see. I think the big breakthrough was The Lion King. If you were a kid, you could go for the stuffed Simba dolls and talk about how you’re gonna be a mighty king, so enemies beware. But if you were an adult you could get the silkscreened handbag with the Julie Taymor designed Mufasa head, and think about the brilliance of Garth Fagan’s choreography or Lebo M’s collaboration with Hans Zimmer on the music. It reached across a spectrum, going from cartoon to the fine arts.
High School Musical hasn’t exactly hit the fine arts yet, but think on this:
- In the U.S., the original album was quadruple-platinum, the top of 2006
- It also broke top-100 records with 9 original songs simultaneously.
- 2006 also put it at #2 for the United World Charts and #1 in Mexico
- The novelization was a NYT bestseller, selling 1.2 million copies
- Disney has licensed the musical 2500 times
- The musical has been performed over 10,000 times by amateur theatre groups.
- It’s also been adapted to an ice skating version, which will tour over 100 cities internationally in its first year (see, that’s where the headline comes from. Catchy, no?)
And they’re not stopping. The license to High School Musical 2 will be available in October of 2008, and an estimated 2000 high schools are gearing up to produce it. Filming for “High School Musical 3- Senior Year” has begun under heavy security in Utah.
And here’s the thing: the perfusion of this musical through our culture is good. It’s a story of differing groups maintaining their identities and still getting along. Something the world needs right now. Maybe Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama should stage a show of it to patch up the party.
I guess the nail polish kits shouldn’t bother me. I just need to adjust to the new way of musicals, their own version of the “long tail.” But for someone who idolized the gypsy lifestyle, where the musicals stayed on the floorboards and maybe in a recording studio. No more. Now it’s in my google, in my grocery store, everywhere I turn.
And you know what? That’s not so bad.
image courtesy of Newscom
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POSTED IN: Broadway, Broadway Hits, Theatre, screen to stage
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