Theater Camp (2023)
The first of many challenges faced by Theater Camp’s plucky crew of teachers occurs when their beloved leader Joan (Amy Sedaris) is incapacitated in an early scene, having experienced an adverse reaction to a strobe light while watching a young prospect onstage. As another character notes with all due gravitas, it’s “the first Bye Bye Birdie-related injury in the history of Passaic County.”
Joan’s absence from the summer session precipitates a wider crisis for the AdirondACTS theatre camp as her hapless son Troy (Jimmy Tatro) tries to head off a bank foreclosure and the camp’s star teachers Amos and Rebecca-Diane (Ben Platt and Molly Gordon) face big changes in their creative partnership.
Joan’s injury has at least one more deleterious effect. That’s putting Sedaris – one of the most reliably fearless comedic performers in American stage and screen – out of action for most of Theater Camp’s running time. While congenial as a tribute to the kind of summertime havens for Broadway-loving teens that inspired the film, this debut feature by Gordon and Nick Lieberman could use more of the wilder spark that Sedaris might’ve provided.
As a mockumentary full of quirky people who live for the stage, it also lacks the harder edge of Christopher Guest’s Waiting For Guffman (1996), though that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Whereas Guest’s take on his characters’ grand delusions and miniscule talents could verge on cruel, the attitude here is largely affectionate. Rather than make their characters targets of ridicule, Platt and Gordon – who also co-wrote the film with Lieberman and co-star Noah Galvin – present them as enthusiastic if somewhat solipsistic guides for the precociously talented amid a fundamentally good-hearted milieu.
Amos and Rebecca-Diane’s badly co-dependent relationship serves as a principal source of humour, as does Troy’s vulnerability to the schemes of the villainous Caroline Krauss (Patti Harrison), the director of a wealthier camp hoping to snap up the property. The creation of the Joan-inspired musical also yields some fine backstage-comedy gags, though the prevailing air of niceness means many jokes land more softly than they ought to.
But given the increasingly hostile climate for LGBTQ+ youth in the U.S., it still feels quietly radical for the film to celebrate what may be the safest of possible safe spaces for adolescents who identify first and foremost as “theatre kids”. That emphasis also leads to Theater Camp’s richest moment of comedic reversal as one male camper – who’d earlier tried to conceal his fondness for throwing footballs – comes out as heterosexual while onstage in front of his two dads. “We knew,” one parent says amid tears of love and pride. “We always knew.”
► Theater Camp is in UK cinemas now.