First look at Disney+ musical Better Nate Than Ever features full-circle HSMTMTS reunion

It's time to raise the curtains on Better Nate Than Ever.

EW has your exclusive first look at the new Disney+ musical comedy that stars newcomer Rueby Wood as Nate Foster, a small town kid with big Broadway dreams. But there's only one problem for the aspiring theater star: he can't even land a part in his school play. So when his parents leave town, Nate and his BFF Libby (Aria Brooks) sneak off to New York City for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to prove everyone wrong.

Based on the book of the same name by Tim Federle, the movie is a celebration of theater kids everywhere — and it also features a big High School Musical: The Musical: The Series reunion, as writer/director/producer Federle cast star Joshua Bassett as Nate's older brother (see below). "Joshua Bassett has been this good luck charm for me since he was cast as the very first series regular in HSMTMTS, and it was a joy when he signed on to this very different role of Nate's jock older brother," Federle tells EW. "It was really full-circle. I knew that Josh had this dream of living in New York City in an apartment with no air conditioning and just writing songs all day, and I was like, if you come do this movie, you're going to get paid to live in New York City for a summer. And he was like, 'I'm in!'"

Federle was proud to see Bassett grow from the former newcomer on HSMTMTS into the older mentor for the young actors on the set of this movie. "When he first started on High School Musical, he was hired at 17 and it was his big break," Federle says. "And it was so cool to see Rueby and Aria, who watched the series and were fans of Josh, look up to Josh now."

When Federle first wrote Better Nate Than Ever as a novel almost a decade ago, he was inspired by his own experiences growing up as a theater kid in a small town with big aspirations. "It sort of came from my backyard, literally and proverbially, because at the time I was dancing on Broadway and I was working on Billy Elliot and it felt like a really far leap from my days as this Pittsburgh theater kid who dreamed of coming to New York," he says. "I first came to New York when I was 14 with my mom on this trip to see Broadway shows, and I got this idea because I felt like dancers can't dance forever. I was like, what am I going to do if I don't keep dancing? I decided to quietly write this pretty autobiographical novel without knowing what I was doing, and I just wrote from the heart."

But Federle says that Better Nate Than Ever is for everyone, not just theater kids like him. "Nate is very much a classic middle school protagonist who dreams of this big wide somewhere out there," he says. "And whether your dream is baseball or politics or being a chess player or whatever, a lot of us were that kid from a small town. This is for underdogs out there, anyone who feels like they're the costar of someone else's story, because we're all the stars of our own life. And while the odds are crazy in show business and in New York and frankly just in staying sane as a normal human, somebody beats the odds every day and I hope the audience who watches this remembers that could be them too."

Adapting his own book for the movie allowed Federle to change "quite a lot" from the page to screen while still making sure he kept the spirit of: "What if John Hughes had directed Billy Elliot?" Along with expanding the side characters of Libby and Nate's brother into larger, more central roles, the show-within-the-show is also got Disney-fied — literally. "The biggest change is that the book had E.T.: the Broadway Musical as its winking fake musical that Nate was auditioning for, and in the movie, I'm working for Disney now and Lilo & Stitch emerged as something I could make a musical out of," Federle says. "So Nate is auditioning for Lilo & Stitch."

Throughout filming, Federle started to realize that his fake musical was actually too convincing. "It was the craziest thing because we shot where Aladdin is currently playing — Disney gave us the outside and the inside of the New Amsterdam Theatre in New York City — so we transformed the outside of the theater," he says. "The incredible production designer Jane Musky decorated the entire side of the New Amsterdam Theatre to become Lilo & Stitch and while we were shooting, there were all these Broadway rumors, like 'Where did this musical come from?' 'Lilo & Stitch is coming to Broadway?'"

Federle laughs before setting the record straight, "I'm sorry to disappoint Broadway viewers that it's not yet a reality. But if you see the movie, you'll at least see a version of it come to life."

Better Nate Than Ever also stars Lisa Kudrow, Michelle Federer, and Norbert Leo Butz, with Marc Platt and Adam Siegel as producers and Federle and Pamela Thur as executive producers. The movie premieres April 1 on Disney+.

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

Related content:

• HSMTMTS season 3 casts Disney Channel vets Corbin Bleu and Jason Earles
• The definitive ranking of all of Olivia Rodrigo's original HSMTMTS songs
• HSMTMTS showrunner explains season 2's 'eerie' parallels to Olivia Rodrigo's music career