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HSMTMTS Cast Rewatches the Show’s Best Scenes From Season 1 | Olivia Rodrigo, Joshua Bassett

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The “HSMTMTS” cast climbs back into East High’s hallways for one night, laptops open, hearts on their sleeves.

TV Guide pulled together the cast of Disney+’s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series for a virtual reunion, and the result is the kind of unscripted moment fans of the show had been asking for since Season 1 wrapped. Olivia Rodrigo (Nini Salazar-Roberts) and Joshua Bassett (Ricky Bowen) anchor the group, joined by Dara Reneé (Kourtney Greene), Matt Cornett (E.J. Caswell), Frankie Rodriguez (Carlos Rodriguez), and Julia Lester (Ashlyn Caswell) for a scene-by-scene rewatch of the debut season that premiered on Disney+ in November 2019. The cast reacts in real time to their own musical numbers and swaps set stories the cameras never caught the first time around.

• The reunion features six Season 1 cast members — Olivia Rodrigo, Joshua Bassett, Dara Reneé, Matt Cornett, Frankie Rodriguez, and Julia Lester — watching clips together over video call.
• The centerpiece moment is the “Rini” kiss between Ricky and Nini from the season finale, which Bassett says he is watching on screen for the very first time during the session.
• The rewatch covers the show’s biggest musical numbers and character milestones from a season that premiered on Disney+ in November 2019.

A Real-Time Reaction, Not a Rehearsed One

What separates this reunion from a standard press junket is timing. TV Guide didn’t just ask the cast to reminisce in the abstract — they put the finished footage in front of them and hit play. That structure forces genuine reactions instead of rehearsed sound bites, and it’s why Bassett’s admission lands the way it does: he tells the group this is the first time he’s actually seen the completed kiss scene between Ricky and Nini, rather than just having lived it on set.

That distinction matters to anyone who followed the show’s fandom in real time. Actors often shoot scenes in fragments, from angles and takes that don’t resemble the final edit, and Bassett’s reaction — watching alongside Rodrigo and the rest of the cast rather than alone in a screener — gives the moment a spontaneity that scripted promo rarely delivers.

Revisiting the Numbers That Defined Season 1

The group doesn’t stop at the finale. They work back through the musical sequences that built the season’s identity, reacting to their own early performances as East High students the way any fan would — with a mix of pride and disbelief. For a series built around restaging the numbers from the original High School Musical trilogy while carving out its own story, watching those scenes back together lets the cast measure how far the characters — and the actors — had come by the finale.

Bassett reveals the session marks the very first time he has actually watched the finished scene of the Rini kiss on screen.

On-Set Chemistry, Off-Screen

Beyond the scene reactions, the cast leans into the behind-the-scenes texture that made the show’s ensemble feel lived-in — Reneé, Cornett, Rodriguez, and Lester each weigh in with memories from filming their characters’ arcs alongside Rodrigo and Bassett’s central storyline. It’s the kind of group dynamic that’s become a staple of Disney+ press cycles, similar in spirit to the cast reunions built around other musical-driven properties, including the sing-along breakdowns fans have done with numbers like “What Else Can I Do?” from Encanto. The throughline in both cases is the same: performers picking apart their own musical work with the audience watching over their shoulder.

The conversation also underscores why Rodrigo’s writing credits on several Season 1 songs mattered to the show’s identity — a young cast shaping the material rather than just performing it, not unlike the way theater-trained talents such as the ones profiled in the untold truth of Lin-Manuel Miranda have blurred the line between performer and creator in modern musical projects.

By the end of the rewatch, the six actors have covered the emotional spine of the entire first season — the kiss, the numbers, the friendships built on set — in one sitting, giving fans still waiting on more episodes a reason to go back and stream Season 1 from the start.