Working with a $6 million-plus budget ($2 million more than the original), High School Musical 2 begins on the last day of school at East High, when the cunning Sharpay Evans (Ashley Tisdale) finagles a job for Troy at her daddy's country club. While she's intent on scoring some alone time with her crush, Troy — more playmaker than playboy — outsources jobs to the other Wildcats, who end up taking over the club and performing at the talent show.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but let's get to the stuff that'll really send tweens into a tizzy. HSM 2 contains nine new songs, and a piece of news so enormous that you need to be sitting down for it. Brace yourselves...Efron sings! Like, for real! The first HSM featured tunes that were written for a tenor before the baritone Efron was cast, so Disney mixed his voice with that of singer Drew Seeley; this time around, the songwriting team, including composer David Lawrence, penned songs specifically in Efron's vocal range.
Just as important as fine-tuning the peppy score was reassembling the creative team, and everyone is back — from executive producer Bill Borden (the brains behind the franchise) and the Emmy-winning choreography team to the impossibly cute cast, which includes Lucas Grabeel as Sharpay's jaunty brother, Ryan, and the Russian-born Olesya Rulin as the piano-playing Kelsi. Not that any of these youths would even dream of turning this down. Or would they? Efron has already parlayed his leading (man? boy?) status in HSM into a film career. He was conspicuously absent from the concert tour (Seeley replaced him) while shooting his first feature, Hairspray. He is also in talks to play the lead in the upcoming remake of Footloose, to be directed by Ortega. But Efron wasn't quite ready to graduate from this franchise just yet. ''I think all of us consider this as the place where we really broke into the business,'' says the 19-year-old, now equipped with de rigueur sk8ter-boi hair and biceps. ''There's no way you can't be humble when you come back.... We're the same people.''
NEXT PAGE: The kiss everyone's waiting for — will it happen?
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