- Man, Vanessa Anne Hudgens (though pretty in that non-threatening Disney manner) is almost a black hole of lack of charisma.
- Zac Efron is clearly the new coverboy for Lisa Simpson's favorite magazine. At least as Link he had the winking irony, here, it's almost annoyingly sincere.
- Sharpay and Ryan are far more fun to watch than Gabriella and Troy, even if having Sharpay eagerly join in "We're All In This Together" is more than a little bit of a rejection of her character. It's fairly clear early on that Tisdale is probably the most talented performer on screen, which throws things off balance, and she gets almost all of the adult-targeted jokes (I doubt a whole lot of 12 year olds got the Tony Award/Tony Hawk joke).
- If most material on Broadway were as well choreographed as "Stick To The Status Quo," "Get Cha Head In The Game," and "We're All In This Together," I'd be a happy man.
- Of course, "Stick To The Status Quo" makes little sense from an internal consistency standpoint--people singing a song about why you shouldn't be singing songs! (Related--what high school has a show which is apparently written by the students--book, lyric, and score?)
- While the upbeat songs are incredibly catchy and toe-tapping, the ballads are WAY too generic, with the possible exception of "Start Of Something New," which is helped by the upbeat chorus. The Ryan/Sharpay "bad" version of "What I've Been Looking For" is far better than the "right" version.
It's far from being either great filmmaking or a great musical, but it hits what it aims for almost perfectly, and that's, I think, why it's become a bona fide phenomonon.
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