Update, Tuesday, January 18 at 7:00 p.m.: Lowrise jeans are making a comeback Justin Bieber’s “Baby†is almost a teenager, and now Jason Earles is playing a grown adult? Yes, the Disney Channel starlets who grew up playing teenagers have graduated into playing grown-ups in the Disney Universe. For season three of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, the theater kids have found their camp counselors. Deadline reported HSM Alum Corbin Bleu, Hannah Montana’s Jason Earles, and Zombies’s Meg Donnelly will be joining in guest-starring roles; Bleu will be playing himself, and Donnelly will play a counselor in training. Surprisingly, Earles will not be playing a teenager/young adult but instead a “stone-faced†camp director. Series regulars added to the cast are Adrian Lyles and Saylor Bell from Disney Channel’s I Didn’t Do It; both will be playing campers at Camp Shallow Lake.
Original Story Follows.
If there’s drama to be found in any high school’s theater club, there’s always even more drama to be found when all those kids go off to theater camp. That seems like the reasoning behind the next season of Disney+’s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, which will send its characters off from their regular lives and to “the ultimate summer at sleepaway camp, complete with campfires, summer romances and curfew-less nights†when it returns for a third season.
The very meta show started out with a bunch of kids staging their own version of the stage musical of High School Musical at the high school in Salt Lake City where it was filmed. In the second season, they did Beauty and the Beast, and two of the show’s actors, Olivia Rodrigo and Joshua Bassett, became immensely famous with the release of her hit song “Driver’s License†and the speculation about their romantic lives it provoked. To depict theater camp, the show is moving from Utah to Los Angeles and will start production later this year. Disney+’s release doesn’t specify which of the characters will be heading to camp, so we’ll have to wait to see if Ricky and Nini go off to the great outdoors with the rest of the crew or if Nini has simply become too famous to keep doing this (which, to be fair, is already a plot thread they started establishing last season — it’s a very meta show).