After the first renditions of her Hannah Montana hits “This Is the Life” and “The Climb,” Miley Cyrus ruffled her period-perfect blonde bangs as she settled back into the character that launched her career. “I used to think of Hannah as something separate of myself,” she told the audience of 215 superfans who gathered at Sunset Gower Studios last month to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Disney’s “Hannah Montana” with a concert taping. “This special is my reclaiming of merging Hannah and Miley together.”
Cyrus had gathered her most devoted fans — so devoted, in fact, that several hopped on flights from Brazil and London with less than 24 hours’ notice — to honor the milestone that she referred to as her “Hannahversary.” (“I get so mad when people call this an anniversary,” she said.) It’s easy to forget that a superstar like Cyrus once worked in the Disney trenches as a teen actress with dreams of stardom: Over the past few decades, Cyrus has shed her skin anew as one of pop’s most magnetic stars, a true creature of reinvention who came of age in the public eye just as her TV character once had. For Cyrus, “Hannah Montana” wasn’t just a launching pad — it was also a parallel to her life being written in real time.
One fan in attendance, Jen, who came to the taping with two friends, took a broader view of the “Hannah Montana” curio: “It was great seeing someone do normal girl stuff,” she told me before the taping. “Living in Los Angeles is celebrity culture, and it showed that celebrities are real people. They’re still going through the same themes of family and friends as you are. The core is the things that you all go through.”
It’s why all these years later, the true “Hannah Montana” fans — the ones scoped out by event organizers who had online paper trails proving their devotion — descended on Hollywood to attend the concert taping portion of the special. The week prior, Cyrus had been spotted filming in full Hannah Montana regalia cruising Malibu, where her character lived, and had filmed a sit-down Q&A with true superfan and “Call Her Daddy” host Alex Cooper, who watched the concert taping from the back of the room next to Cyrus’ mother Tish.
For the taping, fans had lined up as early as 5:30 a.m. to see their idol. This, they later explained in TikToks and X posts, was something they never thought would happen. Their lives were about to be changed.
Attendees were encouraged to dress in something inspired by Hannah Montana, and boy did they. Everywhere you looked, it was like a Limited Too exploded: coral dresses over magenta tights, butterfly clips, tiny scarves, even tinier handbags. Vintage t-shirts from early Hannah Montana tours. Cowboy boots as far as the eye could see — that is, if your Y2K sunglasses straight out of a J. Lo video weren’t too tinted. It was as though Hannah Montana’s coveted closet, which was recreated on the soundstage set, had become sentient and unionized on a Hollywood lot. At one point, as we waited in one of the many lines we endured, a girl named Ali gushed to her friend about spotting someone’s yellow zebra-print top and single pink glove: “It sent tingles down my spine.”
Dressing the part was a given. After all, these Hannah Montana fans wanted to be there. Badly. As we stood outside the studio, a woman named Gabriela told me that she had arrived from Brazil only an hour ago. She had gotten a text at 8 p.m. last night and was on a plane three hours later to Los Angeles. It was a nail-biter, she said, as her flight got delayed an additional three hours. Still, she wouldn’t have missed it for the world. “She’s everything I wanted to be,” she said, slipping off her jean jacket to reveal a bicep-length tattoo of Cyrus on the backside of her left arm. What exactly was it that had made her such a big fan? “The fact that she’s grown up with me. She’s so versatile. The fact that she’s always changing — it’s amazing to see.”
That was the unifying theme of everyone who had taken a Summer Friday in February (it was a piping 90+ degrees in Hollywood). These superfans connected with Hannah Montana in ways that two decades somehow couldn’t weaken. “Everyone says you should kill your inner child,” an attendee named Love told me. “But she would have loved this.” Love had driven with her friends Amy and Gabby to the lot, listening to Hannah Montana songs along the way. “It was an escape watching the show,” recalls Gabby. “I felt like I was in Malibu with her.”
To be a Cyrus fan, and on top of it a “Hannah Montana” fan, required unfettered allegiance. What came next put their fandom to the ultimate test: hours of waiting to be let into the soundstage, which felt, quite frankly, like a sanity check. Attendees congregated on the roof of a five-floor parking garage that, even at 10:15 a.m., felt like being locked in a tanning bed. Two small tents shaded those who got there earliest, leaving throngs of fans — the rest of us — to bake in the sun as security locked our phones in pouches. (It’s not unusual, it should be noted, that tapings make attendees wait and wait. That the production team behind this special didn’t account for an unseasonably hot day was an egregious error.)
Waiting became a standard of existence. What followed was an hour of mulling about the lot before we were moved to an empty windowless room divided by a chain-link fence. “I want to see how many lines we can go in before we get there,” said one male fan. “At least there’s air conditioning.” That was, until the A/C seemed to cut out somewhere around what felt like the 45-minute mark. It was a sobering lesson in our dependence on technology: without our phones, time didn’t exist.
Eventually, we were brought into the soundstage where a hype man impressively excelled in the thankless task of keeping the energy high. “Hannah Montana will be here in five minutes!” he vamped, making that same promise for what felt like every 10 minutes. It was somewhere around 1:30 p.m., I think, when Cyrus finally poked her head out from behind a curtain next to the stage. Finally, it was time, a moment 20 years in the making. What’s an extra three hours of waiting?
Cyrus, of course, was as vibrant as ever as she reinhabited Hannah Montana. The character seemed to come right back to her as she emerged from backstage with black shades and a black dress, clutching a gold-studded microphone. The taping itself was pretty standard as far as these things go: Cyrus sang “This Is the Life” and “The Climb” live twice before exiting the stage and reemerging to lip-sync the songs for a third time. “It’s a little confusing, huh?” she told the crowd as she killed time between performances. “Hybrid Hannah: a little bit of Hannah, a little bit of Miley.”
It was during this brief break that Cyrus seemed to take in the moment. “I was on the TV in [your] living room,” she said. “Everything we wrote, we got to be with you all in your homes… That’s what my character didn’t want to let go of.” She acknowledged the absurdity of the show’s premise — that slapping on a wig was such a transformation that no one in her school would realize she’s moonlighting as a pop star — with her signature wit. “Disney was the first to do drag on TV,” she quipped. After she lip-synced the songs for a third time, she appraised her own performance with a snappy reference to “Ru Paul’s Drag Race”: “Shantay, you stay.”
It was fitting, then, that choreographer Jamal Sims, a regular on “Drag Race,” was here to instruct fans on how to react to Cyrus’ third and final song, “Best of Both Worlds.” Producers handed out signs for fans to hold up during the performance that featured six backup dancers and a massive “Hannah Montana” marquee hung at the back of the stage. For each rendition, Cyrus emerged from a trap door in the stage and sang the “Hannah Montana” theme song, pretending to shred a guitar at just the right moment. Pyrotechnics flashed behind her. The gratification was immediate; tears glistened on fans’ cheeks as the lights pulsed on stage.
And with that came the last burst of confetti at the song’s final run-through. It was the end, the closing of a chapter that could very well have never been opened. It was time for Hannah Montana to go back into dormancy, forever minted in a Disney special. By then, it was 3:30 p.m., and no one really seemed to want it to end. That, it was clear, is the stuff that legends are made of.
