As incubators of pop stardom go, the Disney corporation has, rather unexpectedly, outlasted around two decades of dramatic shifts in the music industry. While “The Mickey Mouse Club”—a show that helped prepare pop singers such as Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and Christina Aguilera for megastardom—no longer exists, some of this generation’s biggest talents spent their youth working on Disney soundstages. A few have had more direct paths than others: Olivia Rodrigo, Gen Z’s pop-punk princess, rose to fame as Nina Salazar-Roberts on Disney’s “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series,” a lightly satirical TV show inspired by the eponymous films. Her recording career eclipsed the acting during the show’s second season, when her début single, “Drivers License,” broke records on Spotify and made her one of the youngest artists ever to top the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
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