High School Musical (2006)

#100 on the IndieWire 100 Greatest Movie Musicals of All Time list

May 09, 2026

My New Project

A few years ago, I listened to a great podcast, Unspooled, whose hosts watched their way through the AFI “100 Years...100 American Movies” list and discussed each film’s cultural importance and their personal opinions of them.1 Because I’m not currently writing a book (though I am jotting things down on a rapidly-growing list of book ideas), I have a bit of free time and energy this summer. So I decided to take on a project based on Unspooled: to slowly work my way through the top 100 movie musicals!

Musicals have always been an important part of my life. When I moved to New York in my mid-twenties, I immediately went to see Daniel Fish’s reimagining of Oklahoma. I moved to London two years later in part because of an amazing gender-swapped reimagining of Sondheim’s Company that I saw while on a research trip here (also, because I was offered a job in London). But before I was able to live in the big cities where musical theatre productions and revivals originated, outside of occasional trips and regional or high school productions, I encountered musicals on the screen. My sisters and I grew up watching classic movie musicals - especially My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof, The Sound of Music, The King and I, Singing in the Rain, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, and (if operetta counts) The Pirates of Penzance. We also watched all the Disney musicals, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Sleeping Beauty to Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and Mulan. When my family got a Netflix subscription, I put myself in charge of ordering the DVDs, feeding us a steady diet of classics, such as Fred Astaire and Ginger Roger movies, as well as more recent fare such as Dreamgirls, Chicago, and Rent. I have since watched pretty much any new film billed as a musical, from The Last Five Years and La La Land to Tick… Tick… Boom!. But I know there are a lot of movies that I either don’t know about, never got around to watching, or watched once a long time ago and have completely forgotten about.

I had a look around the internet and found a recent list that I liked the look of, Indiewire’s 2024 list of the best movie musicals. There are a lot of movies on the list I haven’t heard of and would love to watch - or that, as in the case of High School Musical, number 100 on the list, that I decided I would love to rewatch!

High School Musical

Because, as much as I loved all the musicals listed above, High School Musical blew my thirteen-year-old mind when I first encountered it shortly after its 2006 release. It was a musical set in a contemporary high school that incorporated cutting (or, perhaps more accurately, I realize on rewatch, somewhat blunted) commentary on the values imbued into that setting into catchy songs performed by a charismatic cast.

So I couldn’t wait to revisit this movie. And… I liked it!

Obviously, this statement requires some caveats. This is not a good movie. There is a moment when an actor is supposed to be tap dancing, and the director could not even be bothered to cut to the feet of someone who was actually tap dancing, preferring instead to just play the sound of tap dancing over the actor moving their feet around. One character says he has baked a “pie” and presents what is clearly… a cake. At one point Troy for some reason tries to call Gabriella on his cellphone while he is in class - WHY? How will he be able to talk with her on the phone while in class?

Also, as my partner said, after watching half of it alongside me, “this movie is funnier than I expected but has no plot.” Here is the plot, such as it is: a basketball player and a nerd want to audition for the school musical. So they do.

It’s based on Romeo and Juliet, if the blood feud between the Capulets and the Montagues were the difficulty of balancing multiple extracurricular activities. And yes, it might have been more artistically satisfying if they’d realised they couldn’t actually do everything and had to make some real choices, but the movie’s whole point is that you actually don’t have to make choices and you can win everything, so at least that’s internally consistent.

The movie emphasizes the need to accept everyone’s differences by, ludicrously, presenting us with characters who secretly do the most anodyne activities imaginable: one jock bakes, one nerd breakdances, one skater plays the cello.

As Professor of Musical Theatre Dominic Symonds writes, “seeing these entirely unproblematic activities as indiscretions (singing, baking, playing the cello) is so fundamental to the guided behaviour implied by High School Musical that one wonders whether this song is intended ironically or not.”2 Absent is any hint of the kinds of secrets I remember teenagers tentatively sharing with one another, such as self-harm, substance abuse, sexual activity, sexuality, and gender identity. This is in part because of Disney’s restrictions on what could be shown; attempts by the director Kenny Ortega and the actor Lucas Grabeel to depict his character as questioning his sexuality were cut from the finished movie (Disney had then never depicted a gay character).3

But it’s also because the movie deliberately crafts a world in which all your secrets, looked at in a certain light, are actually humble-brags. It’s easy enough to emphasize that all high schoolers’ secret activities can be not only accepted, but actively condoned as essentially productive activities, once you learn that these activities all consist of the kinds of hobbies that help you get into college by showing that you’re well-rounded. As Gabriella (hilariously) says to her mother on her first day, “I don’t want to be the school’s freaky genius girl again.”

But not only is she not ostracized for being a “freak” once her “genius” is discovered, she actually makes a bunch of new friends amongst the members of the Scholastic Decathlon team. High School Musical is full of ordinary children who are deathly afraid of being looked on as freaks, for no good reason - like every high school. That’s why I can’t be too mad at the movie’s emphasis that all of its characters are essentially the same, in that they are “all stars:” because I think any teenager who needs this kind of reassurance deserves to get it. The goal of all art can’t be alienation; it’s okay for some art to exist just to reassure you that you’re not unloveable.

Anyway, the film’s many problems don’t really matter, because of the sheer energy and charisma that the young stars pour into their performances. Take a look at the first number, “Start of Something New,” which shows us two reluctant singers discovering their voices and their desire for the limelight at the same time as their attraction to one another.

You can see why this cheaply-made movie became a worldwide hit. Ashley Spencer’s book Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel's Tween Empire, describes the film’s origins as a low-stakes experiment in creating an original Disney Channel musical (its title was originally meant as a placeholder, describing the concept).4 As Spencer tells it, no one working on the film had any idea that it would resonate so deeply with viewers. But the movie’s premiere on the Disney Channel drew 7.7 million watchers, and its songs shot up the Billboard charts almost immediately upon its release. “We thought it would work - not become a cultural phenomenon,” as Spencer quotes someone involved with the production saying dazedly.

Watching this movie made me feel acutely how different the year 2006 was from our beleaguered present. Not just because everyone uses their cell phones to actually call one another, but also because of the outfits. I remembered from my youth that this movie had a character who wore the coolest, best outfit ever.

Guys… this is the outfit (in the thumbnail) :

It was a different time.

Best dance sequence: "Get’cha Head in the Game” is impressive, and has one of the best moments in the movie - when Troy veers from singing about basketball alongside his teammates to singing about musical theater, revealing his newly-awakened desire for show business.

Best song: “When There Was Me and You” really got me. Is it, in the context of the movie, a bit of an overreaction to Gabriella’s beau telling his friends he didn’t really care about auditioning for the musical with her? Yes. Did I sing along to every word, accessing a remote corner of my mind in which this song has been reverberating for the last twenty years? Also yes.

Would I recommend this movie? It depends. If you remember it fondly from your childhood, or are curious about mid-2000s culture, then yes. I found it mostly pretty fun to watch (it does drag a bit in the middle). If you’re looking for lyrical depth and complex symbolism, probably not. That said, the lyrics are not bad at all. The rhymes are pretty simple but they are true rhymes, and the songs often cleverly and always clearly express the characters’ states of mind.

Does it deserve to be in the top one hundred movie musicals? Maybe, in that it feels like it encapsulates the time in which it was made and because it was a genuine phenomenon. If you’re judging on cultural relevance, then probably yes; in terms of its quality as a musical, or a movie, probably not.

The Manuscript

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