High School Musical 3: Senior Year (Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Tisdale, Lucas Grabeel, Corbin Bleu) – Director Kenny Ortega and writer Peter Barsocchini bring their franchise to the big screen after two wildly successful Disney TV teen musicals. It’s senior year at East High in Albuquerque. I hadn’t seen the two early Emmy Award-winning Disney Channel-produced and aired movies that have been all the rage among tweens, but I sure like what I see. This is a return to the wholesome, fun musicals of the 1950s and ’60s that brought us Oklahoma, Guys and Dolls, State Fair, Mary Poppins and their ilk.
They feature incredibly talented and beautiful youngsters singing great songs and dancing in athletically choreographed scenes right out of the quality you get on Broadway. Gone are the serious social themes of recent musical successes like Rent, Phantom of the Opera, and Les Miserables. Back are the light boy/girl-driven stories like Grease. In fact, this is most like Grease (the working title of the original HSM movie was Grease 3) with the handsome and gifted Zac Efron (Hairspray) as Troy, high school basketball star and stage performer extraordinaire. He’s good in every way you can think of, thus a little different than John Travolta’s Danny Zuko. The ingénue is Gabriella, played worldly but sweetly by Vanessa Hudgens. She’s every bit the Sandy character Olivia Newton-John played but without the shyness. Stockard Channing’s Rizzo character is played by Ashley Tisdale as Sharpay. She’s the drama queen – literally – and the self-absorbed center of the universe. The supporting cast is strong, featuring Lucas Grabeel as Ryan, Sharpay’s brother, the would-be choreographer; Kelsi as the plain but incredibly talented composer/pianist, played by Russian-born Olesya Rulin; Monique Coleman as Taylor, Gabriella’s best friend and fellow year-book editor; and Corbin Bleu as Chad, Troy’s best friend and fellow basketball star.
Perky, peppy and pop-fresh without being too syrupy, High School Musical 3 moves these kids through their senior year with only enough drama to keep you interested. But the center of the film is the almost 40 minutes of hip, but lightweight, music written (as were the first two films) by David Lawrence, the son of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. The film is being savaged on IMDB, presumably due to its white-bread storyline and its goodie-two-shoes (though very diverse) cast. But ignore that! Take the kids, for sure. But also just go for yourselves and enjoy the kind of musicals with which you grew up.