Film & TV NewsKristen Bell’s Encore!, Reuniting Cast Members of High School Musicals, Will Be Revamped for Disney+The upcoming streaming service announced the pickupas part of a new slate of nonfiction programming.
By
Ryan McPhee
April 10, 2019
Kristen Bell
ABC/Matt Petit
Dust off those old production photos, because now’s your chance to relive your high school musical days with your former peers.
The upcoming streaming service Disney+ will resurrect Encore!,a series in which Kristen Bell (Frozen, The Good Place) reunites castmates of high school musicals from yesteryear, getting them to recreate their original performances.
Cast
ABC/Matt Petit
The show, created by Jason Cohen (who executive produces with Bell, Alycia Rossiter, Will Gluck, Richard Schwartz, Jim Roush, and Chris Wagner), is among the titles in a recently announced slate of nonfiction programming.
Encore! premiered as a one-hour special on ABC in December 2017 as Bell brought together stars of a 1997 production of Into the Woods. “I know from personal experience [musical theatre] was the only place where the math nerd and the jock and the outcast all got up onstage and sang together,” Bell told Playbill. “High school musical theatre is some of the fondest memories I have and the idea of reliving them—not just to go back to what felt like glory days but also, because high school is an incredibly turbulent time for a lot of us, there are things I’d like to say to people I went to high school with. There are amends I’d like to make. And I think that this show really allows our cast to do that.” Aptly enough, Encore! joins a Disney+ slate that also includes High School Musical: The Musical, a metatheatrical musical series about a high school putting on a stage adaptation of the Disney Channel original movie.
Additional newly announced programming for the streaming service, expected to launch later this year, includes a documentary anthology on the Marvel Universe (currently titled Marvel's 616) and the wildlife conservation-themed Earthkeepers—both of which hail from an exclusive deal between Disney and Supper Club, a nonfiction production company from David Gelb, Brian McGinn, and Jason Sterman.Also in the works are a series on Disney’s Imagineering team and a Disney World-set cooking competition.
