Theater Camp: A rollicking, endlessly good-natured send-up of musical theatre

Almost everyone likes a good show. But there is a class of person for whom musical theatre is a religion, a lifestyle, an identity. You saw a good bit of that in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s take on Tick, Tick ... Boom! Referring to West Side Story as “West Side”. Genuflecting before the altar of Bob Fosse. All that.

A full 20 years ago, Todd Graff’s Camp (pun intended) investigated the origins of such obsessions in a touching drama set at a summer facility for teenage hoofers and belters. Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman here return to the milieu with a delightful first film that generated standing ovations at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Theater Camp is itself shamelessly infatuated with the great American musical, but it also enjoys poking affectionate fun at the kids’ creative tunnel vision. One young fellow is already an agent. Another will stop at nothing to finish his high note. The adults are even more blinkered in their devotion to the Book of Sondheim. In the middle of an intense scene, a kid is called out for “using”. It transpires the young performer was triggering tears with a chemical irritant. “I’m not mad. I’m just furious. Your tears should come from within,” the instructor says grandly.

The film begins with Joan (Amy Sedaris), creator of the AdirondActs theatre camp in upstate New York, falling into a coma during a junior production of Bye Bye Birdie. Joan’s useless son, Troy (Jimmy Tatro), a devotee of crypto and related business baloney, takes over and sets to running the financially threatened business with nothing in his arsenal but naked stupidity. At about this point a message flashes up to tell us the “documentary” we are watching continued despite the disruption. Well … about that.

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For the past 20 years or so the most vaguely defined class of mockumentary – think of Parks and Recreation on TV – has established itself as a vehicle for comic storytelling. In truth, if the titles hadn’t laid it out, one could sit through Theater Camp without realising we were watching a film in that genre. There are too many cameras. There are too many close-ups. Nobody acknowledges the presence of a crew. Why bother framing it as a doc?

Anyway, that nagging quibble addressed, there is little else to complain about in this rollicking, endlessly good-natured entertainment. Ben Platt and Molly Gordon – also the screenwriters – turn up as Amos and Rebecca-Diane, old friends whose relationship just about survived her teenage crush and his coming out as gay. They now teach at the camp.

Ayo Edebiri (Gordon’s costar in The Bear) makes the most of her small role as a new employee who has lied about everything on her CV. Recognise the terrific Alan Kim as the preteen agent? He was the seven-year-old who stole every scene in Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari. That kid really has it.

Theater Camp shamelessly apes the structure of a cheesy musical film from the 1950s or 1960s – the sort that might have starred Cliff Richard. Yes, a nearby, more snooty camp is threatening to buy up AdirondActs and strip it of its gritty charm.

Obviously, Troy softens and gets behind the original musical the kids are staging for the end-of-summer show. It hardly needs to be said they are hoping someone in the audience could, if sufficiently impressed, wave a wallet and save the day. But the chutzpah of the cast and the inventive jokes constantly distract from the cliched narrative.

“I totally believe her as a French prostitute,” Amos says of a kid auditioning as Fantine from Les Misérables.

“Amos!” Rebecca-Diane scolds.

“Sorry. Sex worker.”

There is no possibility whatsoever that Theater Camp, originally a short film, will not become a stage musical. Perhaps it’s already happening.

Theater Camp is in cinemas from Friday, August 25th