Review: High School Musical
Disney musical with drive
It should be said right away that the Helsinki City Theatre’s stage version of the hit film High School Musical is an incredibly well-made performance. It has rhythm and desire, the young actors sing crystal clear and break dance and hip-hop as if they had never done anything else. There is not a dead moment in the performance; director Marco Bjurström and choreographer Peter Pihlström have sewn together a dense whole that demands a lot from the actors and is bursting with released energy.
The actors get a nice connection with each other on stage and find the nerve and emotion in both the songs and the lines.
The sound engineers have also done a brilliant job – everything can be heard absolutely clearly, every word that is said and sung.
If the story isn’t exactly original, that’s one thing, and if the music is rather bland, it’s saved by the fact that it’s sung so well and played with such drive.
A musical that is about a selection for a musical has been made before, and there is also no great point in it being in a way also about the selection for this same production, where 900 young people participated and just over three percent were accepted. Modern versions of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, where it is difficult to love if you do not belong to the right group, have also been made before; of these, West Side Story is unbeatable.
Basketball captain Troy and math star Gabriella break the barriers to become Romeo and Juliet in the school musical. They raise questions young people always think about: what is really important, is it sports, politics, culture, science? People ask what happens when a hip-hop player mixes with the string orchestra section.
Everyone competes with each other, there is a constant competition to see who is the best and a constant fear of losing their positions, whether it is about being a point scorer or a chemistry genius.
High School Musical is certainly an educational production, it wants to teach “things that are valuable for adulthood”.
It wants to get young people to believe in themselves and be themselves, and not to build barriers between “us” and “them”. In the Finnish text, there is the superb linguistic image “to blow on the same coal” for cooperation and collaboration. However, you live in a competitive society where you compete with others, and then you should remember that a win in a competition is not about winning over someone else and that the competition is not the most important thing of all.
An every-self and
out-of-the-closet-life philosophy combined with a general sense of community. The society that is depicted consists only of prosperous individualists who are all talented in something.
Problems and complications, and those who are not well-formed do not exist at all. With an incredible sense of course, such things that require time and painful development are put right on the table.
If there is a built-in falsehood in the starting points, the performance does not feel inauthentic at all. There is not a trace of cynicism, and it is not possible to get further than this from the theatre that depicts human hopelessness. The positive is definitely genuine, although one might want to add that the positivity from which the complications have been eliminated may turn out to be illusory.
High School Musical is a highly commoditised Disney performance about which one might wonder whether it is the task of a publicly funded theatre to produce: This is a theatre product, the only kind of theatre that could survive on purely commercial terms in Finland.
Commercial or not; It shows why film can never make theatre unnecessary – nothing can replace the presence of live actors on stage.