Kenny back with 'High School Musical 2'

doweshowbellyad=0; A still from High School Musical 2After making the hugely popular and successful High School Musical, director Kenny Ortega is now back with it’s sequel High School Musical 2. In an exclusive with BT, Ortega and the writer Peter Barsocchini talk about the making of the hit musical
How much time did all of you have to learn the routine of the songs and were the routines more intensive than first High School Musical?
Kenny: Everyday working on High School Musical was a challenge, but it’s a glorious challenge.On day one of the first HSM, the kids hadn’t been working for more than hour and a half, everybody was sweating, the dancers, the principles, all mixed in together, everybody learning the routines and I remember we gave them a break and Zac ran over to me and said, ‘You can work us harder. Let’s make it worth something’. They raised the bar and that bar keeps getting raised. We had less than three weeks to rehearse the entire movie, ten original musical numbers and in less than three weeks, figure that out. This is a bigger movie than any of us thought we would have made in the beginning.
A few years ago you did a very charming big musical and it was not as successful as HSM in its time. A lot of critics said that the film musical is dead, while here you are making the second film musical, so what do you think changed?
Kenny: Well, I like to give a lot of credit to Gary Marsh and his team at Disney. I don’t think that when we made Musics, we reached our audience. I also think it’s just a sign of the times, I think young people are looking for something that exists at the centre of HSM, there’s certain safety and hope and many other things that I think sort of live within the world, that I think kids are responding to, and embracing, and in a big way saying we like this, and we want more of it.
When HSM first started, your guys were relatively unknown, and now they are totally famous beyond words, so what was it like working together this time around. Was there any attitude, you know did anybody get knocked off for being too much of a diva, what kind of fun did you all have backstage?
Kenny: It was not an accident that we came upon this cast. We saw kids from all across, we narrowed it down and our final auditions were seven hours. We really put them through the motions and we knew when it was time to cast we just knew that we had a group of kids who are not in here for the celebritydom. They are in it to do a good job, and its an absolute awesome pleasure to wake up every morning and know that you will be on the sets with this group of people. They are generous, they are hard-working, they are focused, they are prepared, they bring something to the day, every single day and I think that has lot to do with why we are sitting up here today, is because of that remarkable attitude that they all possess.
Peter: I just want to add to what Kenny was saying, because all these kids have become teen idols, that some people forget that they are actors, and when we did, we had a nice script to start with, but each one of these young actors took those characters and made it their own and they made it much better than it was on the page, and what kids have fallen in love with, is something that these kids as young professionals have brought to their role which sometimes gets lost in all that teen idol talk.
Can you tell us about the world of HSM?
Peter: Well, one of the things was we never tried to make it universally appealing. When I wrote the story and worked with Kenny and worked with Gary and Michael Healy, we were not trying to do the literal role of High school, so we wanted to do something emotional about the life of kids. I had seen enough movies where kids in high school were not so nice and not so fun. So that was really what started off to do something about kids having fun at school rather than they get plenty of the angst issues everyday, when they go through metal detectors and go through drug lectures and all that, we were going the other way, that’s all.