Successful Cast Returns for 'High School' Movie Sequel
JACQUES STEINBERG   The New York Times, The Ledger
ST. GEORGE, Utah - Late last month the cast of the Disney Channel blockbuster \
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The Ledger
ST. GEORGE, Utah - Late last month the cast of the Disney Channel blockbuster "High School Musical" - among the most-watched TV movies ever created for children and teenagers, and the most lucrative - reunited here in southwest Utah at a golf resort surrounded by spectacular red sandstone cliffs.

They had come to begin rehearsing for "High School Musical 2," a sequel set at a country club during summer vacation and scheduled to have its premiere on the channel in August.

In conversations behind the locked front gate of the Entrada at Snow Canyon resort, which is serving as the movie's principal set, everyone involved acknowledged that the extraordinary popularity of the first movie - it has earned a profit of $100 million, primarily through DVD and CD sales - had raised huge expectations for the sequel.

"It's like 'High School Musical' on crack," said Lucas Grabeel, 22, who plays Ryan, one of the six lead characters (the one who sometimes wears a newsboy cap at a jaunty angle). "Every dance move is going to be popped harder. It's got to be brighter and more extravagant and bigger than the last one."

But before that can happen, Grabeel and his five main co-stars said, they have had to find a way to turn back the clock, not just in terms of their ages (though they range from 18 to 26 in real life, all are playing 16- and 17-year-olds) but also to evoke a period when their own innocence mirrored that portrayed on screen.

In the aftermath of the original movie, which had its premiere in January 2006, all of the lead players became stars in their own right. Some starred in other Disney Channel movies (Grabeel, Corbin Bleu) or on prime-time series (Monique Coleman, a contestant on "Dancing With the Stars" on ABC). Others released chart-climbing solo albums (Ashley Tisdale, Vanessa Hudgens and soon, it is expected, Bleu). And Zac Efron, who plays the heartthrob Troy, even graduated to a feature film, "Hairspray" with John Travolta, due later this year.

That the cast members, most of whom were little known before "High School Musical," have shed some of their naivete this time around is most evident in subtle ways. Though their families were ubiquitous on the set of the first movie, all but the youngest - Bleu, who just turned 18 - have left their parents at home this time.

Coleman even arrived with a personal assistant (who happens to be Grabeel's sister). And, like daughters whose flashes of rebelliousness have occasionally given their fathers fits, Tisdale and Hudgens tweaked Disney a few months back with the short hemlines of the costumes they wore for solo performances during a touring "High School Musical" concert.

The person probably best equipped to ease the actors' landing back to earth is Kenny Ortega, the director of both the original "High School Musical" and its successor. He has brought to the production a grown-up's perspective on Hollywood. His long list of credits as a choreographer includes the film "Dirty Dancing" and the "Twist and Shout" parade scene in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," as well as videos by Madonna and concerts by Barbra Streisand.

After putting the main cast members through their first dance rehearsal for the sequel here in a mirrored ballroom, Ortega, 56, gathered his perspiring troops for a pep talk worthy of a college football coach. "Take a moment and stop and recognize the specialness of this moment," he told them in a soft but emphatic voice. "This is something that will not necessarily always be there."

Bleu, recently featured in "Jump In," a Disney Channel movie that drew even higher ratings than "High School Musical," said he detected an admonition in Ortega's talk, if only between the lines: Be sure to check your ego at the door.

"For all of us a little light bulb just went on," Bleu, his looping brown curls intact, said in an interview. "And it was like we had never left." For everyone involved in "High School Musical 2," the effort to beg lightning to strike twice would probably be easier if they knew for certain why the first movie had become such a phenomenon.

Intended as a "burst into song" throwback to traditional musicals like "West Side Story," the original emphasized a simple theme: Follow your inner voice, no matter what your peers may say. That message was carried by two characters in particular, Efron's Zac and an academic whiz named Gabriella (Hudgens), who defied their friends by landing lead roles in the winter musical at their high school.

"It's 'Romeo and Juliet' meets 'Grease'" is how Bill Borden, the movie's executive producer, pitched the original idea to Gary Marsh, a senior Disney Channel executive who, as luck would have it, was searching for just such a project.

"Instead of warring families," Marsh, the president of entertainment for Disney Channel Worldwide, recalled Borden saying, "you have warring social factions. I got it immediately."

And so did the viewers. They showed their love many times over by buying not only the movie on DVD and its soundtrack on CD (making it the most popular album in America last year), but also T-shirts with the show's name and tickets to the 40-city concert tour earlier this winter, which featured all the principals except Efron.

The sequel tells a similar tale, though this one is more about the perils of temptation.

Sharpay Evans, the rich girl whom audiences loved to hate in the original movie (played by Tisdale), is on a campaign to woo Troy, the basketball coach's son, away from Gabriella.

The setting is a luxurious country club owned by Sharpay's father, where Troy, Gabriella and their East High classmates have all landed summer jobs. Instead of a school musical, the source of conflict (and more than a few songs) is the club's annual talent show, and Sharpay is scheming to get Troy to perform a duet. And as in the first movie, the closely held script includes more than a little teasing about whether Troy and Gabriella might finally kiss.

East High, which in real life is about four hours north in Salt Lake City, will make a cameo as well, as the setting for a boisterous opening song on the last day of school. Though the movie is set in New Mexico, Utah has been used as a stand-in.

On a rainy morning late last month, the cast gathered in the ballroom of the clubhouse here to rehearse a dance number set to a new song, "Fabulous."

For the scene, which will ultimately be filmed poolside, Ortega and two choreographers were directing Tisdale, Grabeel (playing Sharpay's hammy yet deferential brother) and three young actresses to pretend to swim in their chaises as if in a 1960s "Beach Party" movie. They then lay back to pass around beach balls in a Busby Berkeley-like sequence. Over the loudspeakers Tisdale (as Sharpay) could be heard singing the song, which pays homage to 1980s-era excess a la Madonna's "Material Girl":

"Iced tea imported from England

Lifeguards imported from Spain

Towels imported from Turkey

Turkey imported from Maine"

Earlier, in an interview at which she arrived wearing big wraparound sunglasses and appeared thinner than in the first movie, Tisdale spoke of two emotions that might seem difficult to reconcile. One was her obvious gratitude to the Disney Channel for making her a star, not only in "High School Musical" but, before that, in the hit sitcom "The Suite Life of Zack and Cody." But she also talked about wanting to spread her wings a bit.

She had received permission, for example, to perform three songs from her new album, "Headstrong," which was not produced by a Disney label, during the "High School Musical" concert tour. On the album, Tisdale sought to do something she could not in the movie: act her age (21).

Thus, the songs are mainly about romance, breakups and jealousy. The album version of one song, "He Said, She Said," a rapid-fire recounting of a relationship that would sail over the heads of most of Tisdale's pre-teenage fans, features the lyrics "I can see us touching like that/I can see us kissing like that." But after Disney's standards and practices division intervened, the lyrics were changed for the stage show, with "dancing" and "chilling" taking the place of "touching" and "kissing."

Tisdale proved more defiant in the outfit she chose to wear onstage, as well as in her gyrations alongside the backup dancers. Several newspaper critics, as well as parents, found her performance unnecessarily provocative.

"I don't know what is up with the dressing," she said, her ever-present smile suddenly taut. "I had shorts on. A corset top over a tank top." "I could totally understand if you're wearing shorts with high heels or wedges; that makes it come off sexy," she added. "I was wearing Converse sneakers. Which makes it youthful."

Still, the actor to emerge from "High School Musical" with the prospect of the most grown-up career, at least in the short run, will probably be Efron, 19. With his role in "Hairspray" completed, he was granted permission by Disney to leave the "High School Musical 2" set for a day so he could attend a callback audition for a lead role in "Speed Racer," a forthcoming Hollywood movie based on the 1960s animated series.

Efron's voice is little heard on the "High School Musical" soundtrack, despite his character's lead role in some of its biggest songs. Instead most of his songs were sung by a backup singer, who is credited on the album. Asked why, Efron explained that his deep baritone had been deemed an uneasy fit with the rest of the cast.

And what of the soundtrack for the sequel?

"Let me put it this way," he said. "I'll be singing all my own stuff in the new movie. And in 'Hairspray.'"

Like the other principals, Efron had committed to return for "High School Musical 2" last spring, before it had become clear just how big a hit the first movie would be. (While all six got raises for the sequel and bonuses on the release of the DVD, no one involved would reveal how much they were paid.)

"I made the decision a long time ago to come back," Efron said. "So I'm honoring it now. But I think I would anyway."