Theater Camp

The fledgling theatre geeks in Theater Camp, a mockumentary set at an ailing upstate New York drama camp, would rather spend their summer vacation on a stage singing show tunes than celebrating their scholastic freedom outdoors. For these precocious youngsters bitten by the showbiz bug, AdirondACTS – the camp’s name clues you in as to the kind of humor at work here – is a place where they can thrive with other like-minded kids for a few weeks out of the year, a refuge where they’re not mocked or teased for their oversized theatrical passions. If you were a drama nerd growing up, you’ll probably find Theater Camp endearing in its embrace of a let’s-put-on-a show subculture that seems quaint today. You’ll be in on the joke(s). But if you abstained from such enthusiasms in your youth, you may be annoyed by the movie’s winks and nudges, visualizing a vaudeville hook to yank every showboating thespian offscreen.

This feature-length film is an expanded version of a viral 2020 short film created by three of the principal actors playing camp counselors in the ensemble cast here: Ben Platt, Noah Galvin, and Molly Gordon, the last of whom also co-directed this film. (The second co-director, Nick Lieberman, also helped craft the earlier 18-minute short.) All four are credited as screenwriters on this decadelong collaboration that assembles some of their budding theatrical experiences into something resembling a home movie. However, it's largely improvised – sometimes for the better (Owen Thiele’s entertainingly named gay costumer, Gigi Charbonier, is a grade-A scene-stealer), other times for the worse. There’s a DIY quality to Theater Camp, from its flat cinematography straining for cinema verité realness to its predominantly enervated direction to its storyline whose gaps feel largely budget-driven. To its credit, the movie may appear cheap, but it never feels that way.

The movie auspiciously begins with stalwart AdirondACTS founder Joan Rubinsky (Sedaris, seen all too briefly) suffering a seizure from a strobe light used in a musical number from Bye Bye Birdie; it ends with the camp’s premiere production of Joan, Still, an original musical about her storied life performed as she lays comatose in a hospital bed. (It’s funnier than it sounds.) In the best footlights tradition, the show must go on. “We know how to turn cardboard into gold,” one adult instructor tells a class of eager adolescents jonesing to put on a show. Theater Camp may not qualify as a 24-carat enterprise, but when it occasionally shines, it glimmers with a love for the transformative magic of the stage.