Drew Seeley Remembers Disappointed Reactions When He Stepped in for Zac Efron on “High School Musical” Tour: ‘You Ruined My Childhood’

NEED TO KNOW

• Drew Seeley opened up about replacing Zac Efron on the High School Musical tour

• Seeley provided the singing voice for Efron’s Troy Bolton in the original 2006 film

• Seeley said that fans had a “cognitive dissonance” when they saw him on stage

Drew Seeley’s path to the High School Musical tour was long and winding, but fans didn’t always appreciate that in the first moments of the show.

Seeley, 43, appeared on the Oct. 22 episode of Get Your Head in the Game with Bart Johnson (who played Coach Johnson in the movies). Seeley, meanwhile, co-wrote the movie’s song “Get’cha Head in the Game,” sung by Troy Bolton. When Zac Efron was cast as Troy, Disney decided to use Seeley’s voice instead of Efron’s for Troy’s singing.

Seeley told Johnson that director Kenny Ortega knew his voice from the demo he recorded, and he spent time with him and cast members like Ashley Tisdale, Vanessa Hudgens, Corbin Bleu, Monique Coleman and Lucas Grabeel in the studio recording the movie. But after the movie was wrapped, Seeley figured, “It’s a Disney Channel movie. I made $500 and then go back to P. F. Chang’s.”

The movie premiered on Jan. 20, 2006, when he was on shift at P.F. Chang’s. “It was playing on the bar top TVs,” he remembered. “And I was telling my coworkers, ‘That’s my that’s my voice on there.’ They’re like, ‘Yeah. Okay, dude. Get back to work.’ ”

But High School Musical turned into a massive success, and Disney decided to have the cast members tour and perform the songs in concert. But Efron was filming 2007’s Hairspray and wasn’t available.

“Disney and [Ortega] could have really thrown me under the bus when it came time to tour and Zac wasn’t available,” Seeley said. “But they said, ‘You know the music. You were here from the beginning. Hop on board this ride.’ ” Seeley said he was “grateful” they went with him.

Johnson said, “That must have been strange. Like, you’re the lead guy now of this show.” Seeley agreed, explaining he barely knew the cast before the tour. But there were bigger challenges.

“The hardest part of the tour was the opener was ‘Start of Something New,’” Seeley said. “The stage is backlit, and then I gotta come out by myself.” He started singing the first line of the song — “Living in my own world.”

“And you don’t see who it is, and then the lights come on. And I remember in every city, there the audience would be like, ‘Yeah!’” Until they saw he wasn’t Efron.

“Then they’d be like, wait a minute and die down. ‘Oh, it’s not Zach.’ So then I had to spend the rest of the song trying to win them back,” he said. “But credit to the movie and the music, I don’t think it would have mattered who was up there. I think by the end of the first song, they were all in.”

He said the tour was “so much fun” but that some people still have “a weird cognitive dissonance” about him and Efron. “Even now, people are still finding out, and the response is either, ‘Oh my gosh. You were my childhood,’ or ‘You ruined my childhood.’”

“People try to make this, like, Team Drew, Team Zac thing, and it’s just it’s not that,” he said. He added that he’s only met Efron “a few times” but he’s “always been super kind and cordial.”

After about four months of touring, Seeley’s High School Musical journey ended; Efron voiced Troy in the second and third films, released in 2007 and 2008.

But the actor remains grateful. Looking back at when he co-wrote “Get’cha Head in the Game” (which took 20 minutes), he said, “My next five, six years was like a meteoric rise in opportunities just because of that one session.”

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