Twelve-year-old Elizabeth Levine of Flower Mound can't wait to see Disney's High School Musical when she heads to the Dallas Summer Musicals show with more than 100 fellow Girl Scouts next week.

She's a bit disappointed that Troy won't be played by Zac Efron, whose posters plaster her room at home and her tent in the Texas Hill Country, where she took time out from sleep-away camp to talk to us on the phone. But she's still excited, she says, because the show itself is a star.

"I like the music and the moves they do and how it's about real life. I like how it's about how you can be who you want to be, that you can be different," Elizabeth says. "In the movie, sometimes they judge people, but they come together in the end and they become friends. Life should be like that."

The show, which opens Wednesday at Fair Park Music Hall, has touched a chord in kids and made a phenomenon of this Romeo and Juliet -tinged tale about a whiz-kid girl and boy jock who buck their respective cliques to be together and fulfill their secret, shared dream of singing in their school musical.

Since premiering in January 2006 as a Disney Channel television movie, the original High School Musical has reached more than 250 million viewers worldwide and won two Emmys.

It has spawned a concert tour, an ice show, a High School Musical 2 sequel (the top basic cable telecast of all time, with a soundtrack that has gone triple platinum), an upcoming High School Musical 3 big-screen movie (due in October) and merchandise galore.

Most astonishing is how, two years later, none of this has slaked the appetite for the stage adaptation of this show's new national tour. Usually, producers work from the top down, with a goal of getting a show on Broadway, then putting it on national tour, then granting licenses to regional theaters and finally giving community theaters and high schools the rights to do a show.

But High School Musical has reversed that trajectory, starting on television and moving its way up from high schools to this professional tour.

Disney has stayed supportive of the school shows, too. Last year's joint High School Musical production by Arlington Heights and Western Hills highs schools in Fort Worth was featured in a Disney Channel "docu-musical," The Music in You, in January.

The two schools just finished a pilot production of High School Musical 2, which they will bring back Sept. 9-12 at Arlington Heights – two months before Disney's own professional premiere debuts at Theater Under the Stars in Atlanta.

Broadway might not even be in the cards, which doesn't bother Steven Fickinger, Disney's vice president of theatrical licensing.

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"It can land in the catalog of classic musicals even if it has never been to Broadway," Mr. Fickinger says. "High School Musical seems to keep breaking all rules and writing its own rules."

Because of that, producers may rethink plans for other shows.

"The paradigm has changed," says Mr. Fickinger, who notes he'll be talking to kids about High School Musical and High School Musical 2 before deciding whether to do a stage adaptation of the upcoming movie. Which means that if the kids are feeling ownership of this franchise, they should.

"They have a voice," Mr. Fickinger says. "As long as kids want to spend time with these stories and these characters, we're going to find ways to bring them together."

That's fine with the kids we quizzed, who want "more," in the words of Sharpay's "Fabulous" song in High School Musical 2.

Emmalee Clubb, 8, of Flower Mound, can't wait to see the stage show. She says she likes the way Gabriella made it "cool" to be smart, and the High School Musical song "We're All in This Together" helped her deal with a group of bossy girls at her school.

"I felt intimidated at first, but I decided to try to make friends with them and see if things would get better. And it did make it better."

Also auguring well for ticket sales, which rely on willing adults, many parents report that they enjoy sharing this show with their kids. Michelle Armstrong, 38, of Sherman loves it because it reminds her of Grease, which she says is her "favorite movie of all time." Meanwhile, her daughter, Shellby, 8, dreams of becoming a lifeguard as Gabriella does in High School Musical 2– that is, once Shellby learns how to swim.

"I'm going to see High School Musical 3 and High School Musical 4, 5 and 6!" Shellby exclaims, referring to sequels that do not yet exist. "I want to see all of them."

How can you experience High School Musical? Let us count the ways so far (in addition to the Dallas Summer Musicals production): the original Disney Channel movie High School Musical, High School Musical: The Concert (in which many of the TV movie's stars toured the country), High School Musical: The Ice Tour, Disney Channel's High School Musical 2 and lots of merchandise, including CDs, a video game, books, clothing and dolls. Still to come: the October release of the big-screen High School Musical 3.