‘High School Musical: The Musical: The Series’: The Review

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/arts/television/high-school-musical-review-disney-plus.html

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God bless “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series” for not containing any murders. The revved up erotic gloom and doom of teen TV — partially attributable to “Riverdale,” more attributable to “Pretty Little Liars” — is completely, mercifully absent from the new series, replaced by a Disney cheerfulness and flashes of Irony Jr. for kids. The result is surprisingly refreshing, even with a title that suggests a sense of redundancy.

The series is about high schoolers staging a production of “High School Musical,” with the added meta layer that the characters attend the school where the movie “High School Musical” was filmed, and their drama teacher (Kate Reinders) claims to have been part of the cast. There are lots of referential jokes and I assume I missed lots more, given that I have only a passing familiarity with the original “High School Musical.” (Shout-out to the kids I used to babysit for and to the dance tutorial on the DVD.) The show, like the movie, like the musical, like high school, is about finding supportive friends and learning to express yourself.

It’s a common fit, teens and performance, whether it’s entire shows devoted to the concept, like “Glee,” or just one-off episodes where someone has to deliver a monologue, like “My So-Called Life.” The “High School Musical” update is geared to a tween or maybe younger audience, so it’s not going for gut-punches or twists so much as straightforward conflict and earnest determination. Nini (Olivia Rodrigo) is nervous that she isn’t up to the task of playing the female lead. Gina (Sofia Wylie) is miffed that she was overlooked (this honestly seems fair, she was better). Nini has a boyfriend (Matt Cornett), but it’s her ex-boyfriend (Joshua Bassett) who’s cast as the male lead in the play. Strife!

The series is not a reinvention of its genre, but it shines in its little specifics, like the agony of listening to someone slog through reading stage directions out loud, or impromptu harmonies that are really just singing an octave up. The cast is bubbly and terrific, and the zingers (“my mother bounced back from an autopsy!”) keep everything from becoming schlockola.

Less successful, though, is its odd real-life counterpart, “Encore!,” which maybe should be called “High School Musical: Adults.” The premise, at least, is a gold mine: People who performed together in a musical in high school reunite years later to do it all again. But the moments of emotional depth and humanity are rare — though sometimes quite touching — and the moments of cringing and overproduction are plentiful.

“Encore!” actually premiered in 2017, with a little-seen one-off episode on ABC; Disney Plus made two new episodes available to press, one that restages a 1996 production of “Annie” and the second that restages a 2007 production of “Beauty and the Beast.” Is “Annie” an odd choice for high schoolers and an even odder choice for adults? Is 2007 maybe not long enough ago to create the we-were-young-once resonance the show is trying so hard for? These are among the unanswered questions.

It’s a forced setting in forced circumstances, and the show never shakes that sense of contrivance in the same the way that, for example, “Queer Eye” does. Five days to put on a musical would be near impossible even in professional circumstances, and so for amateurs — almost all of whom have not been in any kind of performance scenario since high school — it feels weirdly lose-lose. Attempts to nudge people toward breakthroughs feel awkward at best, and genuinely painful at worst. I needed several breaks to get through the episodes.

The most touching part of “Encore!” — and, weirdly, the opposite of what happens in “High School Musical” — is the reverence with which everyone speaks of their high school drama teachers, who are also back for the production and wind up in roles in the musicals. “He bought my cap and gown,” one woman says in the second episode. It should be a bigger moment; it’s a big deal, something that could seem small but looms incredibly large. But the show blows past it.

I wish “Encore!” was better at setting people up for success, and I wish it actually captured what everyone in the series talks about and remembers experiencing: how special it feels to put on a show. How exciting, how vulnerable, how specific. How messy and beautiful. Somehow “Encore!” winds up feeling phonier than “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.”