- Theater Camp
- Directed by Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman
- Written by Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman, Ben Platt and Noah Galvin
- Starring Ben Platt, Molly Gordon and Jimmy Tatro
- Classification PG; 93 minutes
- Opens in select theatres July 21
Big-screen comedies are threatening to become the butt of their own joke this summer. Already, every comedy that has debuted this season has faced indifferent audiences (About My Father, The Blackening, The Machine, the rather wonderful Joy Ride) when they weren’t indifferent to audiences themselves (No Hard Feelings). While next month’s dogs-talking-dirty film Strays looks like it could go either way – if people don’t turn out for Will Ferrell’s border terrier humping a garden gnome, what could possibly get their attention? – the new comedy Theater Camp will very likely not reverse this no-laughing-matter trend.
A mockumentary in the Christopher Guest mould, Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman’s film follows one summer at AdirondACTS, a theatre camp for kids in upstate New York that is facing a crisis. After its founder Joan (Amy Sedaris) slips into a coma, the camp’s operations are turned over to her crypto-bro son Troy (Jimmy Tatro), who is intent on either running the place into the ground or selling it to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, the camp’s two head counsellors, Rebecca-Diane (Gordon) and Amos Klobuchar (Ben Platt), are struggling to come up with an end-of-season production to honour Joan, while also reconciling their professional and personal ambitions.
The interplay between the characters is largely fast and fresh – you can tell that most every performer involved has actual theatre chops, so large are their presences and so often their delivery aimed straight at the rafters. Platt, best known for turning Dear Evan Hansen into a Broadway smash and then a cinematic disaster, is puckishly annoying in just the right measure as Amos, a try-hard who never escaped the glories of his youth. His competitive streak with Rebecca-Diane, complete with accusations of squandered opportunities and anecdotes of cruise-ship-entertainment woes, feels fuelled by a decade of real-deal frenemy machinations.
Tatro, meanwhile, is enjoyably clueless as the selfish bumbler Troy, who is so ignorant of musical theatre that he wouldn’t be able to find a rhyme with Sondheim if his very last Bitcoin depended on it. And supporting players including Ayo Edebiri (The Bear), Broadway vet Caroline Aaron and a tiny army of frighteningly ambitious child actors, all add to the scrappy, let’s-put-on-a-show energy.
For anyone who grew up dreaming of staging Into the Woods in the actual woods, Theater Camp will hit a chorus line worth of nostalgic buttons. Which is also the film’s central problem – the humour here is just too specific in its target that all but the hardest core of theatre geeks will leave shaking their heads and shrugging their shoulders (and definitely not in synchronized co-ordination). There is an effective way to translate niche subjects into universal-appeal comedy – Christopher Guest did it all the time in such films as Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman (the latter film an obvious inspiration for Gordon and Lieberman).
But if you are determined not to go that route, then you have to be deeply, caustically sharp with your material so that the commitment is just crazed enough to be surreal for those who don’t immediately get it (see that other summer-camp satire, Wet Hot American Summer).
Regrettably, Theater Camp doesn’t have a wide enough scope to zoom out from its extremely specific landscape to turn its inside jokes outward, nor an ironic enough detachment from the material that it’s riffing on. There is no reason that the film has to play to or comfort the many musical-ignorant Troys of the world, but when you make a movie for what seems like your very specific group of friends, don’t be surprised when only a quarter of the gags land.
A lesson learned for Gordon and Lieberman the next time around. God, I hope they get it.
Barry Hertz