‘Theater Camp’ Review: Drama Queens
An irreverent ode to theater kids and professionals, 'Theater Camp' skewers its targets with loving care and lots of laughs.
The makers of the gag-filled mockumentary Theater Camp (★★★★☆) must absolutely love the theater to roast its devotees so savagely while still transmitting such respect and admiration for folks who live, breathe, and suffer to put on a show.
That level of dedication courses through just about every kid at AdirondACTS, a summer theater camp in upstate New York that’s the subject of an extremely poised documentary film crew.
Catering to the next generation of Idina Menzels, Nathan Lanes, and Julie Taymors eager to hone their craft, AdirondACTS, like theater institutions across America, is struggling financially.
Founder Joan Rubinsky (Amy Sedaris) and her longtime camp manager, Rita (Caroline Aaron), exercise some comically questionable ethics trying to drum up enrollment for the season, which might be in jeopardy when an accident suddenly sidelines Joan for the summer.
Enter Joan’s try-hard tech bro son Troy (Jimmy Tatro), who’s certain he has the self-proclaimed B.D.E. — that’s business development expertise — to turn around the camp’s fortunes.
A hyper-masculine straight dude who previously had avoided all contact with his mom’s other baby, Troy also serves as the audience’s fresh eyes on this perhaps foreign land of pint-sized Pippins and teenage Sweeney Todds.
The running joke of his fanatical devotion to social media-assisted crypto-millionaires runs out of comic steam, but it pays off story-wise. Playing Troy as the right mix of dense and determined, Tatro fares fine in the straight-man role that drives much of the save-our-summer-camp plot.
But the jokes and jabs are best delivered by the more theatrical characters among the ensemble cast, including Molly Gordon, Noah Galvin, and Tony-winner Ben Platt, all of whom, along with Nick Lieberman, wrote the script based on their 2020 short Theater Camp.
Lieberman and Gordon (a standout supporting player in Booksmart and on season two of The Bear) share directing duties on this feature, which they’ve packed with knowing one-liners (that don’t all land), properly silly slapstick, a few laugh-out-loud funny showtunes, countless Broadway references, and that genuine affection for everything thespian.
The AdirondACTS counselors might hilariously scold a camper for missing a note, or a dance step, or for resorting to a mentholated tear stick for a dramatic scene — “Do you wanna be the Lance Armstrong of theater?!” — but they unquestionably support the kids pursuing their dreams.
So does the film, which, sure, derives most of its humor from sending up how seriously these theater folk take themselves, but also shows that some of these kids are seriously talented. The film’s younger actors — like Minari’s adorable Alan Kim as mini agent Alan Park, the hardest-working talent rep this side of the Catskills — are uniformly good. And, crucially to the plot, the kids attending AdirondACTS also have skills.
Even the ones who don’t are engaged and included in camp activities. The counselors, when they’re not squabbling among themselves, or getting drunk on the confiscated booze, do their best to coach all the campers to be fully, fabulously themselves.
For some of the boys, that means being fabulously femme — and thankfully, Joan founded the camp as a loving, safe space for kids who might find it hard to fit in elsewhere. So even in her absence, the founder inspires her young charges, and also inspires the best running joke in the movie: a show based on her unexpectedly eventful life.
Joan, Still: From Girl to Camp Director, is the latest musical opus from Amos (Platt) and Rebecca-Diane (Gordon), the camp’s Head of Drama and Head of Music, codependent best friends whose platonic love story draws richly from Platt and Gordon’s real-life friendship and amusing good cop/bad cop onscreen dynamic.
One of the camp’s four productions of the season — along with Cats, Damn Yankees, and The Crucible Jr. — Joan, Still marks the summer finale for AdirondACTS, and a mouthwatering opportunity for Galvin’s ever-resourceful camp tech director Glenn, a third-generation stage manager, to prove just how indispensable a good stage manager can be.
The sequence also serves as a fittingly funny finale for the film, which celebrates theater kids of every type having a place that doesn’t just welcome their too-muchness but grants them a spotlight and the embrace of applause.
Theater Camp is now playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.
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