Bart Johnson Says It ‘Pains’ Him This Number Was Cut From High School Musical

Bart Johnson loved being part of High School Musical, but he had one major disappointment.

In the Aug. 27 episode of the Magical Rewind podcast, Johnson, who played Coach Jack Bolton in the beloved Disney series, opened up about making the movies. Johnson’s character is the father of Zac Efron’s Troy, and, in the original 2006 film, as his son feels torn between sports and musical theater, Coach Bolton is definitely on the side of sports.

But the 54-year-old actor was a fan of the movie’s musical numbers, even though he never got to be a part of any. “I don’t dance,” he said on the podcast. But, in the original plan, Coach Bolton would have shared a musical number with Alyson Reed’s Ms. Darbus, the anti-sports drama teacher.

“I had a dance number in the first movie,” he said. When host Sabrina Bryan asked about what happened to it, he continued, “This pains me to talk about, but there was a dance. There was a song. It was like an ‘Anything you could do, I could do better’ number, like from Annie Get Your Gun. And it was me and Darvus.”

“That would have been incredible,” Bryan, 40, said. 

“I’m so mad about it,” he said. He and Reed learned the full number, but he said, “We didn’t shoot it.”

That call was Disney’s, he said. “Anytime you make a movie, they said, ‘Let’s do it fast. Let’s do shorter. Let’s make everything quicker and make the movie run faster.’ So we cut, cut, cut.” In the interview, he noted that the movie was made on a relatively small budget, around $4 million, in Utah. 

“And what goes first to get cut? The old people,” he said.

Johnson joked that he was “not very old” when they made the first movie and that he was actually pretty young to be the dad of a high school student. “I’m like, ‘I could dance. I’m not too old to dance,’ ” he said. He added that he wished they had filmed it so it could have been released as an extra scene for fans.

Bryan said it “would have been incredible” and asked if he could do it for the 20th anniversary of the original film next year. 

“I gotta say that’s one thing I’m so grateful for, like, social media, TikTok, and stuff, because I kinda feel like I could live vicariously. Like, coach gets to have his fantasy life via TikTok,” he said.  “… Nobody’s gonna tell me I can’t dance, now I’m gonna start singing. I’m gonna start dancing.”

On TikTok, the actor, who also appeared in the 2007 and 2008 sequels, often recreates some of the dances from the films. He said, “It’s been so much fun,” but joked that it’s funny that people ask him to “do that dance again” since he “wasn’t in the dance.”

“So I’m learning the dances now, 20 years later,” he said. “But  I love it. It’s great. And I will always forever be bitter about not having that Darvus dance.” He added that he asked Reed to make some TikToks with him, but so far she’s turned him down.