The BHS Theater Company put on High School Musical this past November, and did an incredible job all around. I viewed it on the first weekend of the show, and found that it was the perfect kind of movie for a stage adaptation.
I had heard a lot about this musical, seeing as I knew a lot of people who were spending their nights in the theater with constant exposure to the music. The songs are extremely catchy, but I wasn’t overexposed to them and could enjoy them. Some of them happen to be very repetitive such as We’re All In This Together and Status Quo. The musical was clearly chosen for its cultural impact rather than its plot or even the quality of the music. It’s a familiar story to the audience, and that’s what makes it a good one.
The musical has quite a few memorable songs. It begins with The Start of Something New, which is very on the nose. It’s the first time the leads are heard singing, but overall the song is plainer than the others. Cellular Fusion is a song only found in the stage version, but it felt like it belonged with the other songs and fit into the musical well. It also seems to be a shared favorite. The Status Quo scene is iconic in the original movie and remained iconic in this show. However, the song is the epitome of the musical’s ridiculousness, and has a very hateable chorus.
The plot is a series of cliches, which it seems the actors recognized and leaned into during certain scenes. It was clearly a product of the 2000s, which was a time of high school movies that exaggerated the social hierarchy and put a massive amount of emphasis on cliques. The character who made school announcements was practically a parody, and a comedic highlight of the musical was the way he never broke the rhythm of his intonation. By making it more satirical, the original plotlines became much more forgivable. Its entertainment value came from its corniness.
An interesting aspect of the musical was that they used the audience area significantly more. Of course, this was fitting, seeing as it was High School Musical and they had plenty of scenes that took place in a theater. They could embrace the set that was already there. Previous musicals have used this same method, but this time it felt much more meaningful, especially since the front of the theater was flooded with cast members at the very climax of the show.
The set was an ambitious one, especially since it needed to be built for an enormous cast. The ensemble had a lot of people so they could capture the density of a typical high school. Visually, it was very believable. The show thrived on organized chaos by having heaps of people on stage while still feeling very smooth and thought out.
The show was an enjoyable experience. It was bigger than all of its individual elements because of the life that the cast and crew brought into it. It was dynamic and chaotic, and overall I found it very entertaining.
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