“I don’t dance!” Corbin Bleu sang in “High School Musical 2,” even as he hoofed it up. A dozen years later, Bleu’s still dancing — this time in Broadway’s “Kiss Me, Kate,” where he hangs upside-down, singing while he tap, tap, taps on the ceiling.
Surely, he’s lip-syncing?
“Oh no, it’s live!” the 30-year-old assures The Post. “And there are times when you know it’s live, when a note doesn’t necessarily come out right or I miss a step.”
Not that he misses many, says Warren Carlyle, the “Kiss Me, Kate” choreographer. “He was up for anything I threw at him,” Carlyle says. “He’s incredibly charming and he dances like a dream!”
Bleu’s dream began, as it did with so many performers, in Brooklyn. His early years were spent in Sunset Park, where he soaked up old MGM musicals. By age 2, he was dancing, then modeling and making commercials. He made his off-Broadway debut when he was 6.
A year later, his Jamaican-born actor’s father, David Reivers, moved the family to Los Angeles, to boost both their careers. But while Bleu worked steadily, nothing prepared him for the tsunami that followed Disney’s “High School Musical” and its sequels.
“There’s no handbook for when that happens,” he says, shaking his head. “It was a crazy time.” There was, he adds, “a lot of attention,” some of it unwelcome: Witness the 40-something stalker who sent flowers and love notes to his home, saying she’d leave her husband for him. Luckily, Bleu, at the time, was still living with his parents and younger sisters. He credits them and his longtime managers for keeping him grounded.
“It’s about surrounding yourself with people who are going to be honest, not ‘yes’ people,” says Bleu, who eluded the traps that snared so many young Disney stars.
“All of a sudden, you’re a role model,” he continues. “You want to be good and kind, but that can be confused with giving too much of yourself.”
Bleu still keeps up with his Disney co-stars, particularly Monique Coleman, who played his love interest. When he starred in Broadway’s “Holiday Inn” a few years back, Lucas Grabeel and Zac Efron came out to cheer him on.
“Everybody’s busy, everybody’s working, which is a good thing,” Bleu says. “We’re like siblings. Anytime I see any of them, it does my heart good.”
For now, he’s the only one of the clan whose Wikipedia page, thanks to a computer-savvy fan, has been translated into 213 languages, just a few shy of Ronald Reagan’s. Not that it kept a parade announcer from introducing him a few years back as “CORDON Bleu,” of French cookbook fame.
Nor, for that matter, was he known to his future wife, Sasha Clements. They met in 2011 at an upscale grocery store in Toronto, where she was giving out coffee samples. As Bleu recalls it, she rushed down an aisle to greet him, mistaking him for a friend.
“Too late,” he remembers thinking. “This cute girl is talking to me!” He returned two days later and took her salsa dancing. They married in 2016 after he had proposed to her at Disney World.
About a year and a half ago, he took her back to his old New York neighborhood. “My grandmother’s house looked pretty much the same,” he says. “We went to one of the old delis and got a spiced ham and cheese sandwich. You can’t find spiced ham at all on the West Coast. You ask for it and they say, ‘Black Forest?’ ”
He laughs. “Some things you can only get in Brooklyn!”