Review: High School Musical 2
Whose troops are you standing with, Troy?
That capitalist leaven can be great!
A theatre musical can’t get more entertaining than the second part of High School Musical, produced by the Helsinki City Theatre. And no one in Finland makes a youth musical better than this other than the young talents directed by Marco Bjurström .
The young people singing, dancing and acting on stage are not professionals – yet – but in the hands of professionals in their thirties or forties, High School Musical would lack a tangible sense of youth, carnal credibility.
Of course, the performers of HSM are not from the Vertical Forest, most of them study at some theatre or music school or dance studio.
It probably says something about the professionalism of the crew performing on the stage of the Savoy Theatre that there is, among others, a finalist in the Finnish Talent competition and a few years ago who made it far in the semi-finals of Idols – and they are not in the main roles.
The main role in the second part of High School Musical is played by the whole that is created by the different pieces of the performance: music, dances, people bursting with enthusiasm, set design, costumes, sounds.
Bjurström, together with Peter Pihlström, who created the choreographies, has loaded the Disney musical full of things to see and experience. In large crowd scenes, there is sometimes more of it than the viewer with only one pair of eyes has time and is able to grasp.
Especially big thanks are due to set designer Kati Lukka and Petri Ruikka, who made the videos. Because of their insights, the Savoy stage is transformed on large screens from the greens of a golf course to the kitchen and performance arena of a country club, quite powerfully but also sensually. The sparkling water in the pool and the grass swaying in the wind create a full summer in the theatre hall.
In the second part of High School Musical, young people are living the summer of their lives: a group of friends get summer jobs in the same place. And this place, the Evans family’s country club, has all the opportunities for a great chill after a day at work.
However, the summer does not go as young lovers Gabriella and Troy have imagined. HSM’s half-villain Sharpey puts a spanner in the works as much as a rich girl can.
High School Musical would be nothing if it did not plan and implement a musical-type program. In the second part, it is built around a talent contest in a country club.
The construction of the story in High School Musical is the lightest, even though it also meets all the formal criteria. In addition to all the predictability and typicalities, there is also quite a healthy thing about High School Musical. How much can a person, in this case the boy hero of the musical, Troy, sell himself and his dreams without losing himself and his real friends?
The music in the second part is absolutely catchy, and the young people sing like angels.
The musical scenes set the bar high for the energy levels of the performance, and they don’t stay as intense in the speech scenes or transitions. In terms of acting skills, young people have not yet developed to the same level as in their musicality and physical activity.
I’ve sometimes wondered why High School Musical has become such a popular thing. The auditorium of the Savoy was also packed with exactly the audience that theatres around the country would like to have in their auditoriums: young people and even those who have not been forcibly dragged to the theatre by their mother and father.
Could the popularity be due to the fact that the story is, after all, about quite ordinary young people with their usual problems: girlfriend and boyfriend problems, school issues, living with their parents’ wishes. However, I understand that there are still quite a lot of such young people – despite the world’s bad problems, not everything goes completely wrong for everyone.
After all, HSM also has its glossy side. It is a young people’s own fairy tale about good and evil, love and the growth of young people. It doesn’t aim for very edgy solutions, and nothing is so bad that you can’t get through it by dancing.