From Red, White and Royal Blue to High School Musical: The Musical: The Series Season 4, Should You Add These To Your Watchlist?
From a romance between two high-profile political figures to a love triangle in Taipei, Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado has the scoop on what you need to watch this week.
High School Musical: The Musical: The Series Season 4
Our Wildcats are taking their final bow in the fourth and final season of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. This season finds them multi-tasking as they work to put on a production of High School Musical 3: Senior Year, while being featured extras in High School Musical 4: The Reunion filming with members of the original franchise at their school.
The show remains a strong ensemble piece, anchored by Gina, Ricky (Joshua Bassett), Kourtney (Dara Reneé), Ashlyn (Julia Lester), and Carlos (Frankie Rodriguez). Gina, played by triple threat Sofia Wylie, is absolutely the superstar of this season in so many ways. Not only does she getting a starring role in both productions, but they really bring her and Ricky’s relationship full circle as the ultimate endgame we’ve been hoping for. The ambitious and fashionable Kourtney struggles with picking a college, Ashlyn finally comes out to Big Red (Larry Saperstein), and Carlos worries about the future of his relationship. Through their ups and downs its clear, the Wildcats are all in this together. The musical numbers are top tier in this final season with a mixture of original numbers, songs from both High School Musical 3 and previous seasons, and even a Cynthia Erivo song.
New characters come into the mix to varying degrees of success, but the biggest miss of the season is the hyping up of the original High School Musical cast members, including Monique Coleman, Lucas Grabeel, Corbin Bleu, Kaycee Stroh, Alyson Reed, and Bart Johnson, who aren’t in very much of the season — although it is still fun to see where their characters ended up in the meta reunion special. The series also should’ve stuck to its weekly release schedule instead of dumping the whole season out at once and relies too much on mysterious cliffhanger phone calls to bring in surprise guests. Once or twice is fun, but after that it just becomes too predictable.
High School Musical: The Musical: The Series goes out with a showstopping bang! They continue the meta humor and the heart that the series is known for, while taking it to the next level with its musical numbers and production quality. This cast is one to watch, especially Sofia Wylie.
All four seasons of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series are streaming on Disney+.
Love In Taipei
Love In Taipei follows Ever Wong (Ashley Liao), a girl who goes to a summer cultural immersion program in Taipei only to learn its nothing like she expected. The brilliant and wealthy students party and fall in love, while also trying to figure out who they are.
There are pretty visuals and its lovely to explore the culture in Taipai. While the film has a great young cast, they are unfortunately not given much to work with. Based on the book Loveboat, Taipei by Abigail Hing Wen, this adaptation takes the bare minimum from its source material leading to a very boring story that goes nowhere. There’s not enough substance to root for this potential love triangle, despite strong players in Ross Butler and Nico Higara. What we get is a lackluster coming-of-age story about realizing its okay to not have everything figured out that just feels unearned.
The film is streaming on Paramount+.
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Red, White & Royal Blue
It’s official — Red, White & Royal Blue is incredibly swoonworthy!
Based on the book by Casey McQuiston, we follow the enemies to fake friends to lovers relationship between Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez), the first son of the United States, and Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine).
The film is a love letter to its source material and tackles so much in its well-paced nearly two hour runtime, including royal duty, dreams of changing the world, and the characters’ distinct queer identities. All of that on top of delivering a cheeky and truly romantic love story. Nicholas Galitzine has been one to watch with star-making performances in everything he’s been in from Purple Hearts to Cinderella to The Craft: Legacy. Now he’s done it again, as both Galitzine and Perez are the perfect leading men with off the charts chemistry.
The film is streaming on Prime Video.
