Theater Camp Is A Fun Retreat From Home
Quirky and energetic, Theater Camp is an absolute blast with consistent laughs. It builds upon its humor, layer by layer, by growing increasingly bombastic. Theater Camp is much like a Christopher Guest film, where the style is a mockumentary. The exception is nobody is being interviewed on camera. The audience is strictly watching B roll of the characters bouncing off one another.
Amos Klobuchar (Ben Platt) and Rebecca-Diane (Molly Gordon) help run a kid's camp with the leadership of Joan Rubinsky (Amy Sedaris). During one of the performances, the strobe lights causes Joan to have a seizure. Incapacitated in the hospital, the theater hires Joan's son Troy (Jimmy Tatro) to run the camp's operations in his mother's place. Jimmy has no theater experience, nor has he ever run anything. He's a social media "influencer" with a bro persona slapped on.
The camp is in jeopardy, with Joan gone and her incompetent son running things instead. To make matters worse, if the camp fails to come up with a large sum of money, they will be foreclosed. Troy must devise a solution to keep the camp running, yet he doesn't have the intellect his mom does to protect the place.
Troy's a good person who means well. For that, he's more of a rounded character than just a bumbling dope. Each character has a discernible trait. Troy's the dumb but loveable jock, Amos is a man who takes kid's camp way too seriously, and Rebecca-Diane is the same as Amos as she's always performing for people and never off.
An honorable mention should be given to Nathan Lee Graham, who plays a flamboyant dance instructor. The film bristles with so much personality that even the kids stand out. One particular little one that's hilarious is a boy who walks around in a business suite, pretending to be a highly successful entrepreneur. The kids in the film are very intelligent. They can break down a character's psyche or an acting method that's incredibly knowledgeable and adorable to see.
The funny thing about Theater Camp is its accuracy to the true thing. Yes, much of it is exaggerated. I doubt real kids' theater camps cover the Stock Market or the assassination of JFK. Nevertheless, Theater people are weird but in a very expressive good way. It's a place where you're encouraged to be strange because we're all a little off somehow. So why not embrace it? Theater Camp allows that strangeness to flourish. A lot of people always remember their first camp.
It's a place where competition is an afterthought (unless you want to be the lead in a play), and every camper has time to shine on stage. With such a wide range of personality, everyone comes together as one. Theater Camp captures that special feeling you get from camp through its light spirit.
As someone who's worked in a theater camp for years, the movie brought back memories. Kids want to have fun by letting all their energy out. The theater is a great method for doing that. More so, there's some handy work in the editing room where title cards are placed at the beginning and end of the film, explaining where each character is and the status of the documentary as they were shooting. It's like The Office, except nobody breaks the fourth wall by winking at the camera.
The editing is slick, cutting rapidly from one conversation or stage performance to the next. The picture opens with a home video of plays throughout the years at the camp featuring how it has been around for decades. The dichotomy between the characters works. Ben Platt and Molly Gordon share an electric chemistry. The two are theater nuts who don't stop singing and would naturally annoy the everyday person.
Theater Camp is fast, funny, and possibly filled with improv. The script for the film is loose. It attempts to focus on many plot lines running simultaneously but always keeps focused on the narrative's center. Amos and Rebecca-Diane love this camp. Without the camp, they'd be waiting tables, trying to find acting gigs. It's their optimistic passion for the camp that keeps the place alive.
See this film with a wide audience when it comes out on July 13th. I had the fortune of seeing Theater Camp at the Chicago Critic's Film Festival on closing night, and the room was packed. Not a minute went by when the place wasn't roaring with laughter. Try to get to a crowded show for the same experience. It's a trip worth taking.
