The success of High School Musical has taken even star Ashley Tisdale by surprise. Everywhere she goes, she encounters fans and loving homage to her work in the Disney movie. For example, the outfit pictured below, worn recently to some kind of event that we didn't really pay any attention to, inspired several high school musicals of its own:
Westridge School for Girls in Pasadena, California, mounted an all female version of West Side Story, called Weird Skirt Story, a tragedy about the forbidden love between tulle and leggings. Senior Jennifer Monroe was particularly moving in the role of Boots, Legging's sassy sister. Her rendition of "A skirt that like, it killed your brother/ forget that skirt, and find another/ One of your own kind/ stick to your own kind," brought the proverbial house down.
Across the country, Robert F. Kennedy High School in Hackensack, New Jersey, found great luck with a musical titled Leather Todd: The Demon Wristband of Fleet Street, in which Tisdale's wristband (thrown away by a Tisdale impersonator in the first act) goes on a killing spree, destroying headbands, anklets, and other defenseless accessories -- all in a desperate cry for attention from Tisdale, who tragically ends up in a meat pie at the conclusion of the play.
Tisdale's ensemble inspired even high school students in other countries. Toronto's School for the Performing Arts hosted a two-week long, sold-out run of the student-penned musical The Music Boots, the story of a pair of boots that leaves his past as a con-man behind, redeemed by the love of a blonde actress/librarian named, appropriately, Ashley. The dance routine in which Boots convinces Ashley to leave her buttoned up past behind and do fan kicks on top of her library desk was so well-choreographed that rumor has it, it will be performed by the National Ballet of Canada next season.
