Theater Camp is a kind of film we haven’t seen much of recently: a very, very funny one. Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman’s feature about a summer getaway for young aspiring thesps isn’t an action comedy, or horror comedy, or superhero film with jokes, or strung-out gross-out sketch about talking dogs. It’s just a comedy comedy. It is also the film that has made me laugh by far the most – at times so helplessly I slid out of my seat – since the end of the pandemic at least.
Directors Gordon and Lieberman are working in the same tradition as the great Christopher Guest improvised mockumentaries, like Best in Show and A Mighty Wind. And what those films did respectively for dog fanciers and the American folk music scene, theirs does for children’s drama clubs – that is, it lampoons them into the dirt, but with such boundless and undisguised affection, it leaves you loving them (and the film) all the more for it.
Gordon and the Broadway actor Ben Platt star as Rebecca-Diane and Amos, two former attendees who made the switch to camp counsellors at some point in early adulthood. The pair are invested in their young charges’ work to a near-crazed degree, but also the camp itself, which has clearly been so formative that neither can quite bring themselves to leave it.
As well as passing on their questionable expertise, the two are writing and directing this summer’s big show: a musical tribute to the camp’s founder, Joan Rubinsky (Amy Sedaris), who is languishing in a coma while her business vlogger (that is, unemployed) son Troy, played by Jimmy Tatro, haplessly attempts to keep the ramshackle place off its knees.
