Mar 6, 2026

Building High School Musical: A Cafeteria Inside a Cafeteria

Mar 6, 2026

6 min read

We are building a high school cafeteria inside an elementary school cafeteria.

That is the meta reality of producing High School Musical at Lionville Elementary School. The show opens Friday, March 6th, and runs Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday matinee. It’s basically sold out — maybe 40 tickets left across all three shows — so if you don’t have yours yet, good luck.

No Magic, Just a lot of stuff

High School Musical doesn’t have any magic like the Fruma-Sarah dream sequence. Nothing flies, or glows, or transports the audience back to a ye-olde time. This show is about making a space feel like a real school — industrial, lived-in, a little bit institutional. The job here is solid construction, smart reuse, and the right details.

I made a lot of boxes. I made a few platforms. I made sure none of them would collapse under the weight of kids dancing on them.

I borrowed some railings from the high school to make it look properly industrial.

The Ford Escape Problem

I don’t have a truck. A lot of the lumber for this show came to the school via my Ford Escape.

The obligatory lumber selfie

This is embarrassing. It is a life goal to one day own a truck. Until then, the Escape will do with friends with trucks to fill in on occaision.

Building for Reuse

One of the things I’ve gotten much better at after a few years of doing this is thinking in reusable shapes. Every piece I build now is designed with its next show in mind.

The key constraints at our venue:

3 feet max height. Our stage is low. Anything taller and the bigger kids start approaching the lighting rig with their heads.
3 feet max width. This is the storage constraint — pieces need to fit in the slots under the stage.

Working within those two rules, I designed the platforms and staircases to be bolt-together assemblies. Every leg is labeled to its corresponding riser so the whole thing can be broken down after the show and reassembled in a future one.

Platform frames laid out on the stage floor during the build

The front riser section is fully reused from a previous production. The main center platform is also a carry-over from last year. The two side platforms and both staircases are new builds — designed specifically to come apart and come back together again for years to come.

Platforms and staircases assembled — natural wood before painting

Platform construction in the cafeteria

The crew helping assemble is always one of the best parts of this whole process.

The crew helping fit the platform frames together

The Industrial Railings

This is where the set goes from looking like a school play to looking like an actual school. I borrowed pipe railings from the high school — the kind you’d see lining actual hallways and stairwells. Getting that real institutional hardware onto the set is what sells the environment.

The fittings are galvanized cast iron that tightens around the pipe with a set screw. They’re used in real commercial construction and they look it. You can find them online easily; search for “structural pipe fittings” or “Kee Klamp.” However purchasing is out of our budget - so luckily I had a source from Downingtown East High School Theater.

A Kee Klamp structural pipe fitting — the hardware that makes the railings look real

The uprights bolt directly through the platform deck using floor flanges — heavy steel plates that screw to the floor and accept the pipe post.

Floor flange bolted to the platform deck

The pipe railings assembled and installed on the platform

The DJ Booth

The highlight of the whole set is the DJ booth. In High School Musical, the narrator is the school’s DJ — he runs the morning announcements, keeps the plot moving, and creates cover for scene changes. Most productions I’ve seen put him on a rolling platform and wheel him in and out. I wanted to give him a bigger stage.

I built a permanent DJ booth in front of our procenium. When the audience walks in, it’s already there. Jack Scott — our DJ — never leaves the booth. He just lives back there, sitting on a stool between his lines.

The booth has a curved front face, the school’s EHS Radio branding, and the ON AIR sign mounted prominently on top. A nice touch from Tim, Napster stickers feature on the back wall (this was 2006).

That ON AIR sign, by the way, has history — it was originally built for a production of High School Musical that was canceled due to COVID 6 years ago. It sat in storage then made it’s debut for Annie in 2024. BUT I lent it to another school and they never gave it back - so we built a new one.

The DJ booth in performance — Jack Scott at the mic, ON AIR sign lit

The Wildcat

The Wildcat mascot painted on the back wall is the work of my friend Tim Sidorick. Tim is an amazingly talented artist and art teacher in the district — if you look at some of my other posts, you’ll see his backdrops, which are on a completely different level. The Wildcat commands the whole back wall and anchors the scene.

The Wildcat mascot mural painted by Tim Sidorik

The Full Set

Under stage lighting, the whole thing comes together. Platforms, staircases, pipe railings, the Wildcat, the DJ booth — it reads immediately as a high school. Inside an elementary school cafeteria.

The finished set under red stage lighting — platforms, stairs, railings, and the Wildcat

Set Strike: 2.5 Hours of Total Chaos

Sunday matinee ends, curtain comes down, and the whole cafeteria has to be a cafeteria again by morning. That means breaking down every platform, every railing, every staircase, and clearing the entire set so the school can go back to normal on Monday.

What took weeks to build came down in about two and a half hours. The crew went from audience seating to dance party while the set disappeared around them. I filmed a timelapse of the whole thing.

Start of Something New — 1.4 Million Views

After the show wrapped, a TikTok of someone performing “Start of Something New” — the iconic Troy and Gabriella duet — started circulating. Posted on New Year’s Eve 2025 by @natalieiz, it hit 1.4 million views and became one of those moments that reminds you how much this show still means to people. If you grew up with High School Musical, you know exactly why that song lands.

The comments are full of people saying it’s the first thing they’ve cried over in years. It’s karaoke night energy, NYE nostalgia, and the best possible reason to still be doing these shows.

Tips for Building High School Musical

Lean into the industrial aesthetic. Real pipe fittings, metal railings, and institutional signage do more work than any painted flat. Borrow or rent the real thing if you can.
Design every platform to be disassembled. Bolts, labeled legs, and standard dimensions mean your work lives beyond this show.
Surface Painting All of the plywood services on top of platforms are painted with Glidden Premium Interior Paint + Primer. “Scrubbalble and Washable” is the key so it doesn’t trap dust.
Get a truck. I’m working on this one.

More Set Building Projects

If you enjoyed this, check out my other set building write-ups:

Building Annie: Lit Marquee Signs, a NYC Street Scene, and a 12-Foot Christmas Tree — How I built illuminated Broadway-style marquee signs, a carved foam mantelpiece, the Oxydent radio studio, and the Warbucks mansion for our 2024 production of Annie.
Building Fiddler: How We Made Fruma-Sarah Fly — How I engineered a custom wheeled seesaw rig to make the ghost of Fruma-Sarah glide across the stage, launch over the front row, and soar 15 feet in the air.
Building Cinderella: Engineering a Real Working Clock Tower — PVC pipes, cables, counterweights, and a stagehand with a scale to count down to midnight in real time.
Building The Music Man: Five Train Cars, a Flying House, and a Real Piano — Five rechargeable-lit train cars that flip to library bookcases, a reversible house flat with Victorian wallpaper, and a 1,000-lb piano on a rolling platform.