Twenty years ago, actor Todd Graff showed up at Sundance with Camp, his directorial debut, which was nominated for the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at the festival. Based on the experiences he had as a young lad at New York’s Stagedoor Manor theater camp (Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Robert Downey Jr. were also once happy campers there), the flawed but endearing musical-comedy saluted summer camps that gave little Sondheim-loving kids the freedom to indulge in their love of theater, while also encouraging them to never give up on their Broadway dreams.
Two decades later, another actor showed up to Park City with a directorial debut about kids spending one crazy summer staging elaborate shows. But unlike Camp, Theater Camp is not a filmmaker’s love letter to all the people he learned from during his teenage years. This one is more of a spiteful fuck-you.
Molly Gordon, most recently seen as Jeremy Allen White’s love interest on streaming hit The Bear, co-wrote and co-directed this mockumentary with Nick Lieberman. She also stars as Rebecca-Diane, one of the many instructors at upstate New York camp AdirondACTS. After the camp’s longtime owner and founder (a brief appearance from Amy Sedaris) falls into a coma (she has a heart attack during a strobe-light-filled production of Bye Bye Birdie), it’s up to her vlogging, crypto-bro-wannabe son Troy (Jimmy Tatro) to keep the camp from being foreclosed on.
This Camp is an elongated adaptation of a 2020, no-longer-available-online short Gordon and Lieberman made with Dear Evan Hansen star Ben Platt (who plays another camp instructor here) and his fiancé Noah Galvin (who plays the camp’s long-suffering maintenance man). This foursome comes together to do their own Waiting for Guffman, complete with heavily improvised dialogue, buffoonish characters and a rousing but ridiculous stage production that also serves as the film’s finale.
But whereas Guffman director Christopher Guest had love for his mediocre but passionate theater folk, Gordon & Co. clearly want you to loathe these geeks. Gordon has said in interviews that she didn’t have fun at theater camp. Considering how most of the camp faculty (and even some of the kids) are portrayed as self-centered, highly delusional narcissists with middling talent, Gordon appears to be directing some payback at the so-called artists she rubbed shoulders with in the mess hall. Platt’s head counselor Amos is the most insufferable, claiming to be there for the kids but becoming petty as hell around one who’s destined for bigger and better things. He also gets quite salty when his best pal Rebecca-Diane, an autoharp-playing flake who claims she can communicate with spirits, starts leaving the camp to actually pursue acting gigs. Those two and others treat Tatro’s well-meaning-but-out-of-his-depth de facto boss with immediate contempt — and they’re practically oblivious to the fact that they’re dismissing and ostracizing him the same way people have dismissed and ostracized them. Gordon’s Bear co-star Ayo Edebiri plays the only instructor who isn’t a complete tool — and that’s mainly because she knows nothing about theater and lied on her résumé to get the job. (Naturally, Gordon named her after her favorite camp teacher.)
More of a sitcom pilot than a movie (think Abbott Elementary with showtunes), Theater Camp is 95 minutes of successful actors showing how far they’ve come. But they also do something I don’t think was their intention: They give people plenty of reasons to hate theater and those who yearn to be a part of it. Let’s hope this doesn’t inspire kids to beat down any youngster who knows all the songs in Rent backward and forward.
