'High School': Squeaky-Clean Tween Musical

When I asked my 15-year-old whether she wanted to accompany me to "High School Musical," a touring version of the Disney Channel hit, her look of horror made me feel as if I'd committed a mortifying transgression -- as if I'd suggested we don straw boaters and dance together at the annual father-daughter talent show.

Although the musical takes place in high school, it's a version of high school that few in high school would ever recognize. The East High of this over-amplified and overly sanitized production has a severe case of the blands. "Grease" has been swallowed whole by "Saved by the Bell": The nerds and jocks and preps and emos and skaters coexist like so many altos and baritones in the school choir, the only tensions rising when impossibly adorable boys cross paths with incurably adorable girls.

The show is not for me or even my 15-year-old. It's a pumped-up concoction for the Build-a-Bear set. Had it consisted of more than a progression of the sort of '80s bubblegum tunes lampooned in the Hugh Grant comedy "Music and Lyrics," it might have served as a more useful introduction to the ebullient possibilities of musical theater for the fourth-grade girls who rapturously fill the National Theatre.

But as its generic title suggests, "High School Musical" feels less like an artistic experience than a corporate product -- another brightly packaged commodity direct-marketed to the littlest consumers.

No parent of a kid in love with the cookie-cutter hero and heroine of "High School Musical" is going to care one whit about these objections. As a colleague at The Washington Post who brought three 9-year-olds to the production characterized her position for me: The innocence of this pop musical, with its nonthreatening, virtually asexual portrait of teenage romance, is an oasis of harmlessness whose relative artistic merits she is more than happy to leave aside.

I can still vaguely remember my own misgivings, when my daughter was her daughter's age, about the highly suggestive content of so much of what in commercial theater -- not to mention movies or television -- passes for children's fare. So I feel for her and others in her predicament. The desire for popular entertainment that does not make the world of adolescence seem, "Juno"-style, like an always-permeable environment for sex and drugs is a potent one.

It's just a shame that "High School Musical" is so plastically constructed, so calculated to elicit reflexive responses. Like the movie, the stage version charts the super-slight wrinkles in the budding courtship of East High's handsome star basketball player, Troy Bolton (John Jeffrey Martin), and the cute, test-acing new girl in school, Gabriella Montez (Arielle Jacobs).

The Romeo-and-Juliet idea is that a boy tied to the gym and a girl consumed by the lab can throw off the oppressive social labeling of high school and find true love. Their shared secret passion -- the way they get to express their attraction -- is music. Both want to sing, and their crossover plan to audition as a duo in the school musical totally freaks out the other members of their cliques. (You know that you're solidly in the realm of fantasy when the narcissistic president of the drama club, played by the talented Chandra Lee Schwartz, sashays through the school in hairstyles and outfits designed for a 40-year-old Neiman Marcus clotheshorse.)

The musical's best number, the lunchroom-situated "Stick to the Status Quo," rousingly addresses the real problem of ambitions stifled because of peer pressure. A jock bakes creme brulees; a nerd boogies to hip-hop; a skateboarder clandestinely studies the cello. Why can't everyone just do their own thing? The unfortunate shortcoming is that in spite of the energetic direction by Jeff Calhoun, who staged the moving "Big River" at Ford's Theatre, the theme is delivered as if we were all attending a really loud, and really long, school assembly.

Although the TV original clocks in at 95 minutes, the stage adaptation -- padded with additional, redundant songs -- now stretches to more than two hours. The silliest and most overindulged of the material involves an expansion of a scene in drama-class detention (whatever the heck that is), in which a predictably hammy dramatics teacher (Ellen Harvey) now encourages the students to behave, literally, like animals.

Martin and Jacobs make suitably winsome goo-goo eyes as the clean-cut lovebirds, and if the ensemble were to be paid on a pep meter, the producers could go bankrupt.

On Tuesday night, the National's amplification system was a wreck. The mikes seemed to pick up a background noise that sounded like perpetual vacuum cleaning, and at one point, a powerful low-grade electronic rumble made you feel as if the earth might move. Believe me, that effect was entirely artificial.

High School Musical, book by David Simpatico, based on the Disney Channel movie by Peter Barsocchini. Original songs by Matthew Gerrard, Robbie Nevil and 11 others. Directed by Jeff Calhoun. Choreography, Lisa Stevens. Sets, Kenneth Foy; costumes, Wade Laboissonniere; lighting, Ken Billington; sound, Duncan Robert Edwards; music supervision, Bryan Louiselle. With Olivia Oguma, Ben Thompson, Ron Bohmer, Bobby List, Shaullanda LaCombe. About 2 hours 10 minutes. Through Feb. 17 at National Theatre, 1321 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Call 800-447-7400 or visit http://www.telecharge.com.