The intensity of your love for Theater Camp – and you will love it – is likely to depend on the degree to which you are immersed in the chorus line. The Broadway inoculated may, for instance, find themselves with a mouthful of glitter. They can admire the craft no less. Adoration must, however, grow exponentially with increasing involvement. A lowly film critic can but imagine the viewing joy felt by the graduates of actual, real world theatre camps. The in-jokes run riot. That’s no bad thing. Think of Theater Camp as your initiation. By the final note, all outsiders are welcome.
Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman direct, sharing writing credits too with Ben Platt and Noah Galvin. All but Lieberman star. That the quartet, clearly close friends, had a ball in the process is never in doubt. Theater Camp has a lived in honesty. It’s born of experience and very often feels like a patchwork of anecdotes. There is surely more than one drama tutor out there who announces the next term’s show in musical presentation. The cringe is all too real.
As shot in the mockumentary style, Theater Camp celebrates such in-house oddity, all the while playfully sending up the high camp self-aggrandisement. It’s a love letter to a weird but far more accepting world. Think School of Rock meets Camp Rock, by way of This is Spinal Tap. People come to these artistes to escape, to be whomever they wish. That matters. It’s a very funny, very sharp, feature this but drenched in aching emotional truth. The real sort, not the ‘feel your truth’ baloney taught at the camp.
Gordon and Platt play lifelong friends and camp collaborators Rebecca-Diane and Amos. She heads up musical theory, he champions acting. Both teach at AdirondACTS, the titular Summer camp and brainchild of Amy Sedaris’ sincerely beloved Joan. When the bright lights of razzmatazz trigger a coma-inducing seizure in Joan – ‘the first Bye Bye Birdie-related injury in the history of Passaic County’ – her son Troy (Jimmy Tatro), an atheatrical vlogger bro is hooked on stage to take the reins. Baseball cap askew, Troy is as hapless as he is spectacularly misplaced at the camp. ‘You are not one of us’ snaps an irked Amos late in the day. The cool is uncool at theatre camp. There’s a blink-and-you-miss-it subplot that sees one fresh camper building himself towards coming out as straight to his gay dads. It’s garners a big laugh.
One thing Joan failed to mention to her protégés before hitting the hospital hey is just how close her camp is to falling off a financial cliff. While the elite neighbouring Lakeside Camp gifts fee paying attendees an iPad each on arrival, the kids at AdirondACTS have just three weeks to save their paradisal home from home from bank foreclosure. Cue a deliriously ill-fated fundraiser in which a gaggle of students take it upon themselves to turn a rotary club dinner into an all guns blazing immersive theatre experience. It’s horrific to watch in all the right ways and just one peak in a mountain range of sharply penned observational cringe comedy.
Ultimately, it all comes down to putting on a camp-saving show at the end of term. Doesn’t it always? Amos and Rebecca-Diane serve up three shows for the Summer but it’s the duo’s original offering that the ‘documentary’ follows closest. This being a life and times tribute to Joan herself. There are auditions – ‘I do believe her as a French prostitute’ – and rehearsals but it’s the scandal that keeps things tasty. Best of these is retribution afforded a leading youngster who is reduced to actual tears when it is discovered she’s smuggled in tear-inducing eyeliner. ‘It’s a slippery slope,’ barks a seething Amos, as Rebecca-Diane drives herself into a snot laden ugly cry in the name of point making.
Even as the stage is torn from beneath them, the show must go on. Camp must go on. As the final song chimes: ‘camp isn’t home but I think it kind of is.’ It’s affectionate to the max.