Theater Camp
You don’t have to know your Wicked from your Waitress or your Lerner from your Loewe to appreciate the good-natured humor of “Theater Camp” but it helps.
This mockumentary is by, for and about theater geeks, but there’s enough of that infectious hey kids let’s put on a show energy here to engage casual fans for a while, at least. Because for all the snappy audition montages and witty turns of phrase that keep the first act moving, “Theater Camp” eventually sags in its middle section before rallying for a big finish. It’s based on a 2020 short that Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman directed with their co writers Ben Platt and Noah Galvin, and you can feel the strain of stretching this concept out to feature length. Eventually, the movie abandons the fake documentary structure altogether which makes it feel like an unnecessary device in the first place.
But their love for this material, this place and each other is palpable; they’re all old friends who have grown up together and worked together for years. Those glimpses of adorable kids performing on stage at the beginning of the movie? That’s Gordon and Platt long before TV’s “The Bear” and Broadway’s “Dear Evan Hansen” made them famous, respectively. Galvin also starred in “Dear Evan Hansen” on stage and he’s engaged to Platt. Gordon had a key supporting role in Olivia Wilde’s “Booksmart,” as did Galvin. Lieberman, who doesn’t appear on screen but seems like he’d be a charming performer himself, has been friends with Platt since high school and directed some of his music videos. It’s clear how much they cherish this world of hammy misfit kids who find themselves within their tribe within this bucolic setting hours outside New York because they lived it themselves. But sometimes the execution lacks the precision to match the power of their feelings.
“Drama Camp” starts strong with Platt and Gordon playing Amos and Rebecca Diane, former campers who came back every summer as counselors. AdirondACTS (hilarious name) is a run-down cluster of cabins that’s seen better days but still vibrates with youthful energy each year. This time around, however, acting teacher Amos and music teacher Rebecca Diane are forced to run the whole show because founder Joan (Amy Sedaris in a disappointingly brief appearance) has had a Bye Bye Birdie related seizure and fallen into a coma. Her would-be finance bro son, Troy (Jimmy Tatro), shows up and tries to take over, but the theater kids see through him immediately and send him packing.
But the show must go on, which is very funny for a while but not consistently so. Some of these children are insanely talented particularly Bailee Bonick, Luke Islam and Alexander Bello and it would have been nice to get to know them beyond watching them sing their faces off or emote with a depth beyond their years. They’re actually far more interesting than any of the adult characters (except for Galvin’s Glenn, the put upon tech whiz with a secret). A bit involving young Minari star Alan Kim as an agent wannabe who wears suits and makes phone calls all day exemplifies both the specificity and underdevelopment of “Theater Camp’s” humor. It’s intriguingly particular but also woefully thin, ditto for the presence of Edebiri (so great opposite Gordon in “The Bear”), whose character arrives under dubious circumstances that the movie doesn’t begin to explain.
Beneath the bubbling excitement about putting on an original musical (a tribute to AdirondACTS’ founder titled Joan, Still), there is an underlying threat that this may be their final season: The camp is on the verge of foreclosure, and the rich kids’ camp next door is looking to expand onto their land. That could have made for some brash, ’80s style class warfare comedy right there but doesn’t.
The trouble here is that we’ve seen so much of what “Theater Camp” does and seen it done better from the loving sendup of self-important theater people in Waiting for Guffman to the delirious insularity of Wet Hot American Summer. Plus, Todd Graff wrote and directed a 2003 indie called Camp that starred a young Anna Kendrick and Robin DeJesus.
Still, there are enough scattered moments here that result in big laughs. The lyrics to some of the original songs are hilariously awful. An exercise exploring the children’s past lives is delightfully weird. And some of the intense advice these counselors give these eager kids is wildly inappropriate. You may not be humming the tunes on your way out, but you’ll leave with a smile on your face.
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