Last week, I trundled onto the set of the remake of the 1980 classic Fame — alllll together now, I wanna live forevah! — and I quickly discovered that there are just some things about Fame — I’m gonna learn how to fly, high! — that you do not change. For one, while the set was in a real bar in the arts district of downtown Los Angeles, the movie’s setting is still very much in New York City, and the story still follows a group of budding actor-dancer-singers over four years at a performing arts school. For another, those students are all still relative unknowns, like former So You Think You Can Dance contestant Kherington Payne (pictured here exclusively for EW). "We could get known movie stars to play the kids," director Kevin Tancharoen (MTV’s Dancelife) told me, "but we’re making a movie about high-schoolers, not superstars."

Other things, however, definitely have changed. While that burned-in-your-brain Irene Cara title song is still very much alive, it’s been "rebooted." Explained Tancharoen: "We’re not making like a hip hop remix or anything like that, but we’re gonna contemporize it a bit." (Cara’s "Out Here On My Own" is in the mix too, but the producers have commissioned six new songs for the film.) The students themselves have also been given a 21st century spit and polish. Instead of Ralph, the aspiring stand-up comic who bombs in seedy New York comedy clubs, for example, the new Fame‘s student body includes Neil, an aspiring filmmaker with a camcorder permanently stuck to his hands. The teachers, meanwhile, are now played by bold-faced names whose real-life biographies square with the subjects their characters are teaching. Kelsey Grammer, a Julliard grad, is the music teacher; Charles S. Dutton, a Yale School of Drama grad, is the acting teacher; Bebe Neuwirth, who won a Tony for the Broadway revival of Chicago, is the dance teacher; and Megan Mullally, who just finished a Broadway run in the musical Young Frankenstein, is the vocal teacher. Of course, it wouldn’t be Fame without Debbie Allen, but now she’s the school’s hard-charging principal.

The scene I watched last week involved Mullally, drag queens, karaoke, and a rather spirited rendition of the timeless Barenaked Ladies classic "One Week." After the jump, I’ll set the scene, including the racy anecdote Mullally told the kids that had one of her young castmates nervously joking, "And have you met the reporter from Entertainment Weekly?"

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