The New York Times featured a fantastic article about the upcoming High School Musical 2: Sing It All or Nothing!. I almost peed in my pants while reading it from all the excitement.

Here are 5 things I learned about High School Musical 2 and its cast:

• Dance number “I Don’t Dance” pits Ryan and Chad’s teams against one another. It sets a baseball game to a musical score that fuses elements of hip-hop and swing.
• There’s a new song called “Fabulous” has Sharpay and Ryan float around in lounge chairs in a pool and “pass around beach balls in a Busby Berkeley-like sequence.”
• Zac wasn’t featured much on the High School Musical soundtrack because his “deep baritone had been deemed an uneasy fit with the rest of the cast” but he’ll be singing own stuff in the new movie and in Hairspray.
• Lucas Grabeel’s younger sister, Autumn Grabeel, is Monique Coleman’s personal assistant
• And here’s a little synopsis of High School Musical 2: “Sharpay Evans, the rich girl whom audiences loved to hate in the original movie, is on a campaign to woo Troy, the basketball coach’s son, away from Gabriella. The setting is a luxurious country club owned by Sharpay’s father, where Troy, Gabriella and their East High classmates have all landed summer jobs. Instead of a school musical, the source of conflict (and more than a few songs) is the club’s annual talent show, and Sharpay is scheming to get Troy to perform a duet.”

And one Zac Efron quote had a little OUCH factor, which stuck out to me: “Personally, I feel no competition with the cast because I’m not going for the same things they are. A lot of them are doing teen music things, and tours, various TV deals and other Disney TV movies and Disney albums. That’s the last thing I want to be doing at the moment. I’m setting my sights a little bit higher.”

High School Musical 2 is set for an August 17 release.

Pictured: Zac Efron is Troy Bolton, Vanessa Anne Hudgens is Gabriella Montez, Ashley Tisdale is Sharpay Evans, Lucas Grabeel is Ryan Events, Corbin Bleu is Chad Danforth, and Monique Coleman is Taylor McKessie.