My Life In 35 Songs, Track 11: “Breaking Free” from High School Musical

You know the world can see us in a way that’s different than who we are…

Look, I know what you’re thinking, but let me explain! This is the one song that, for just a couple of weeks, made me feel like a pop star.

By day, I was just another 11th grade high school student. I rolled out of bed every morning at 6am to make it to school on time for my zero-hour AP Biology block, then muddled through the rest of my classes. Most aspects of my day-to-day life felt, at best, mundane.

But in the evenings, for two weeks in November 2007, I felt like a legitimate, big-deal famous person. The stage, the spotlight, the recognizable songs, the photo in the newspaper, the “sold out” stickers on the posters, the extremely loud cheers from the audience, the autographs, the flowers and other tokens of appreciation from fans. It all added up to this little taste of how it feels for everyone to adore you, and it was intoxicating.

“Breaking Free,” for those not familiar, is the climactic song and most famous moment from High School Musical, the 2006 Disney Channel Original Movie that somehow morphed from a Friday evening special aired in the middle of January to an absolute cultural phenomenon. There had been dozens of Disney Channel Original movies before, but none of them had ever broken containment like this one did. The High School Musical soundtrack album moved 3.7 million copies in 2006 alone, becoming that year’s top-selling album. For some perspective on how big that number is, no Taylor Swift album has never had a bigger calendar year sales tally in the United States than High School Musical did in 2006.

High School Musical is one of just two soundtrack albums this century to steal an end-of-the-year album sales crown, the other being 2018’s The Greatest Showman. Probably not coincidentally, both of those movies feature the insanely good-looking heartthrob Zac Efron, and it was Zac Efron whose shoes I was tasked with filling in the fall of 2007, when Traverse City Central High School mounted its own production of High School Musical.

I know a lot of people hate musicals, but I love them and I always have. I especially loved them in high school, when the annual musical theater production was the big deal of the year for die-hard choir kids like me. Sure, there were other performance opportunities. But there was nothing quite like the musical and its combination of collaborative spirit, hard work, audience engagement, and sheer performance high. If you were serious about the performing arts in my school, there was simply no better place to grab the spotlight than the musical, and there was arguably no musical in school history – before or since – where the spotlight shown brighter than it did that autumn.

Hitting the stage with High School Musical in the fall of 2007 meant that my classmates and I were performing this show right at the peak of its popularity. The sequel had just premiered on Disney Channel that summer, and the first film had been around long enough for the songs to enter the cultural bloodstream. Even if you’d never seen High School Musical, you’d probably heard “Breaking Free” or “Get’cha Head in the Game,” the former of which went all the way to number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. My choral director, in justifying the choice of the show, called High School Musical “our generation’s Grease,” and she was probably right. Hell, one of the biggest pop stars of the next generation, Olivia Rodrigo, rose to fame thanks in large part to a TV series spinoff of High School Musical that revolved around most of the same songs.

The popularity of High School Musical in 2007 was such that our production sold out all the performances well in advance, prompting the addition of two extra shows the final weekend. A huge number of the tickets were bought by local parents and families with young kids, and the kids and tweens absolutely lost their shit at seeing their favorite movie play out right in front of them, live. There was one part of the show that required my character, basketball star (Troy Bolton, to enter from the back of the auditorium and walk down one of the aisles to get to the stage. “He’s coming down the AISLE?!” I heard a young girl gasp one night, completely beside herself that Troy Bolton himself was just feet away from where she was sitting. When the show wrapped every night, the cast would spill out into the lobby area, where we’d sign autographs for at least half an hour – not with our real names, mind you, but our character names. I’ve joked in the years since that I will probably go to my grave having signed more autographs as Troy Bolton than as Craig Manning.

That entire experience was a whirlwind, from audition prep all the way through the final performance, which just so happened to fall on my 17th birthday. At that time in my life, I had big, big dreams of becoming a famous Broadway star, or maybe a superstar pop singer, and getting a small taste of what that might be like lit a fire in my belly that kept burning for a long time, until four years later in college when I finally let that dream go. We’ll get to that story in due course, and to why I can look back on my performing days and not mourn the dreams that didn’t come true.

But the truth is that, during those big sold-out High School Musical shows, it became deeply apparent to me that what I cared about wasn’t really the strangers sitting in the audience, but the friends performing alongside me onstage. Being able to put on that show – and the other musicals I participated in during high school – was the result of a lot of people putting in a herculean amount of effort and time into a shared goal and passion, and I loved being a part of a team in that way. There were days during musical prep where I would be at school until 8, 9, 10:00 at night. If we’re being honest, the extremely rigorous rehearsal schedule did not do any favors to my high school GPA. But I remember thinking, during my first musical as a sophomore, that I was happier prepping a show with my friends than I’d ever been doing anything else. The finished product was great, but the process of building it was the joy of my life up to that point, and is still something I think of with the utmost fondness – even though it was hard, and exhausting, and sometimes emotionally draining.

That last night of High School Musical, there was a special kind of electricity in the air. There’s some of that during any closing night of any great show – the emotional charge of knowing you’re coming to the end of an incredible journey together. But the atmosphere felt extra magical that night. The show had been a roaring success, and the town had treated me and my friends like rockstars, and we all knew that, even if there would be other shows in our future, there probably wouldn’t be many shows like this. And so, we pulled out all the stops and gave that performance everything we had left: the last of our voices and joy and adrenaline and physical energy. When the performance wound around to “Breaking Free,” I remember looking at my co-star and seeing tears welling in her eyes, a recognition that this whole crazy journey was about to be over. And when the lights cut to black and the curtain dropped after our final bows, I remember the two of us collapsing into a sobbing embrace, because we’d just left a part of ourselves behind that we’d never get back.

If you could relive one moment of your youth, what would it be? I’ve asked myself that question a lot of times over the years, and while there are a near-infinite number of worthy answers, I always find myself coming back around to this night: that last performance of the show that made me feel larger than life, surrounded by friends who’d just traveled an incredible odyssey with me, and feeling so loved as I turned the page from 16 to 17. To this day, it’s the best birthday I’ve ever had.

Get a load of this 12-year-old. (Again, I reiterate: I turned 17 during this show.)

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