STAGE: High School Musical – Live
July 22, 2008Dave Scullion went to see High School Musical: Live On Stage, so you don’t have to.
It was a TV film, it upgraded to the cinema, it had a best-selling album, then a sequel, an ice show, a live concert and now a full-blown stage show. This is the phenomenon of High School Musical – a Disney cash cow that will be gloriously milked until it’s dead and dry, and currently it’s still full of milk. Sadly, however, the milk tastes very, very sour.
Some would say “why bother going?”, simply because the entire franchise is known to be shallow and clichéd pointlessness, as deep as a thimble and half as intelligent, but sometimes you can be surprised by even the worst thought-of theatre. This is not one of those times. Not in any way. My presence at this show was an ironic birthday gift from a reviewer friend of mine, and for the first time in my life I got to utter the words “I wish I’d never been born”. In July, anyway.
The premise is so unoriginal it’s hardly worth mentioning – new girl (Gabriella) is a genius geek who is also gorgeous, who falls for effete basketball jock (Troy), but their classmates immediately oppose this horrendous love-match until the entire school simultaneously decides “actually, sod it, why not?” and they all live happily ever after.
It’s so repugnantly optimistic that every character gets together with their opposite number from jock & geek to basketball coach & lunatic drama teacher. But – pinch yourself – is that a gay teenager over there? Possibly, but he doesn’t end up with anyone and instead gets to dance around in sequined trousers and be mostly ignored. This avoidance of any form of edge (no bullying, no sexual relations, not even any real anger) makes it impossible to empathize with any characters. It is an idealistic world without threat, and the pre high-school demographic are in for a horrible shock come age eleven when their new school isn’t full of cheesy-faced idiots whose idea of bullying is “gentle persuasion”. Instead it’s genuinely cruel-hearted fools and a massive punch in the scrotum. But this is Disney after all, and boy do we know it.
The entire experience is an exploitative vampire puppeteered by Disney, from the £5 High School Musical pens to the shameless in-show plugs for previous Disney pieces (someone sings an excerpt from the Lion King and one guy wears a Little Mermaid t-shirt… and somehow doesn’t get bullied). The shocking surprise is how cheap the set and costumes look, dispensing with the usual plush evocative settings of most Disney shows and replacing them with cold and boring school walls and lockers. Yet this show isn’t about believability or emotional depth, it’s about… well, here’s the stumbling block. On one hand it tries to evoke a sense of righteousness in doing whatever your passion is regardless of general opinion, but then the other throws this idea out of the window if you aren’t important enough to have a speaking role. As refreshing an idea as the song Stick To The Status Quo is (where kids in stereotypical cliques admit they want to be something other than a skater, a geek or a jock), this revelation is completely ignored and the characters remain the same throughout, reverting back to their respective stereotypes and only altering slightly at the end when everyone suddenly loves theatre. And I mean literally everyone, including the basketball coach who utterly changes character and suddenly loves the fact his son prefers drama to sport. Billy Elliot, this isn’t.
So is the music or the script or the cast or even the source material to blame for this inane cavalcade of garishness? Oddly, the source material is so much better than the play. The film is much tighter, much funnier and surprisingly watchable. As embarrassing as it is to admit that I voluntarily watched a sizeable chunk of High School Musical: The Film, it does give me a unique vantage point from which to understand where the theatre version went crucially wrong. The script and music has not been well converted to stage, providing lines like: “Thank you for showing me your top secret hiding place” – a line even a seven year old would baulk at if they weren’t so busy clapping or screaming. It’s a cliché-ridden amalgamation of all things expected. Letitia Dean’s Ms Darbus even says to Coach Bolton: “Never in all my years in the theatre have I seen such small minded, simple subterfuge”. Welcome to Disney, Ms Darbus, welcome to Disney.
High School Musical: Live On Stage lacks the focus of the film, and at times so much action is happening across the stage that you wilfully ignore important dialogue and exposition in favour of watching a man in a hoodie pretending to be a kid pretending to be a caterpillar. Entire chunks of the flaccid plot are lost forever, leaving you in bewilderment as to how the school board allowed a major basketball tournament to happen at the same time as the science decathlon and the school play’s final recalls. This leaves anyone who isn’t solely interested in the music and spectacle utterly perplexed, and this misery is compounded when the first act is fifty minutes long and the second is an excruciating sixty. By the time the song Get Your Head in The Game came on I wanted to get my head in an oven and explore Sylvia Plath’s unique exit strategy… and that’s about twenty minutes in, although the song is generously repeated throughout the show for an audience clearly blessed with a memory of a dead goldfish and a severe hatred of originality.
Yet maybe this is too harsh for something aimed at children. This theatre piece is more akin to a pantomime than a musical, with audience members screaming and yelling for no apparent reason during potentially poignant moments. When Gabriella finds Troy in his “top secret hiding place” (a greenhouse, in case you cared) and they sing sweetly to each other, the audience started randomly clapping to a non-existent rhythm like a bunch of drunks at a music festival. Is this the fault of the audience or perhaps the fault of the play, unable to effectively convey the correct emotion to the audience?
Perhaps because of this lack of cohesion between actor’s intention and audience reaction the actors in High School Musical: Live On Stage never seem to really put their all into the sequences between songs, knowing their words don’t really matter too much. This seems especially so with Letitia Dean, who at times appears embarrassed and uncomfortable bumbling around like a desperate pantomime dame. Only Michael Pickering (Ryan) seemed to genuinely get into his role, but his character was the aforementioned (and unmentionable) gay guy, so any hope of exploring him was quashed as soon as he first flounced onto stage.
Finally, I must mention the venue. The Hammersmith Apollo is in desperate need of a revamp, in the same way the show needs to be smashed to pieces and rebuilt. The interior is literally falling apart, with missing seat and row numbers, carpets which are more chewing gum than carpet, and seats almost as flimsy as High School Musical’s plot. The Apollo’s aging sound system and poor acoustics meant words and songs were incomprehensible, making it even harder to accept the singing basketball team as they danced around the court.
Overall the experience was a garish and unpleasant one, where the audience’s senses were repeatedly assaulted with Disney’s worst kind of optimism which reinforces stereotypes instead of breaking them down. An embarrassing, torturous affair for anyone who’s not a child, and for those parents whose children have forcefully manipulated them into seeing this, it’s time to rewrite your will and exclude them from it forever.
