High School Musical is an Emmy Award-winning American television film. Upon its release on January 20, 2006, it became the most successful movie that Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM) ever produced, with a television sequel High School Musical 2 released in 2007 and the feature film High School Musical 3: Senior Year to be released theatrically in October 2008. It will be the first Disney Channel Original movie to have a theatrical sequel. A fourth installment, High School Musical 4, has been announced to be in the writing stages.

High School Musical was filmed at East High School located in Salt Lake City, Utah, the auditorium of Murray High School, & Downtown Salt Lake City. Murray High School was also the set of: Take Down (1978), Read It and Weep (2006), Minutemen (2008) and High School Musical: Get in the Picture (2008).

Plot

East High School's basketball star Troy Bolton and math-whiz Gabriella Montez meet at a New Year's Eve party at a ski lodge over Christmas Break. Here, they take part in a karaoke contest and sing ("Start of Something New"). They discover they have a great chemistry between them and end up exchanging numbers. A week later, Gabriella's mother is transferred and Gabriella begins classes at East High in Albuquerque, New Mexico where Troy sees her in homeroom. After making sure that it is her on his cell phone, Troy accidentally gets detention, along with Gabriella, his best friend and teammate Chad Danforth, scholastic decathlon captain and head of the science club Taylor McKessie, and Drama Club co-presidents Ryan and Sharpay Evans.