Theater Camp (2023)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Joan Rubinsky (Amy Sedaris) is the dearly beloved founder and director of AdirondACTS, a summertime theatre camp in the homophonous region of New York. When she suddenly falls into a coma (after experiencing a seizure from strobe lights during a production of Bye Bye Birdie), her son Troy takes over as director for the summer. The trouble is that Troy (Jimmy Tatro) is not a theatre artist, and so his personality and language are directly at odds with the young campers as well as with the camp staff. Troy, as a hopeful finance bro, needs to fight the looming threat of foreclosure, keep spirits up for the kids and for his mother, and try to learn exactly what theatre is all about, and he's in for a rough ride.

The opening sequences feature an intoxicating enthusiasm for the material, written and performed by people who clearly know the ins and outs of youth theatre programs as well as wannabe "great" artists on and behind the stage. Clearly the entire filmmaking team loves (and surely identifies with) the misfit, starry-eyed, precocious kids who populate theatrical realms as well as the idiosyncratic, desperate, and deeply spiritual wannabe camp counselors who do this in between other jobs that probably don't pay well and certainly aren't contributing to the characters' artistic expression. Between aggressively paced audition montages, theatre games, and weirdly specific but deeply funny theatre lessons, the early half of Theater Camp flies by (which is saying a lot, as the film only lasts a breezy 90 minutes) with top-notch insider humor at what makes theatre a wonderful world.

The film takes its structural format as that of a mockumentary, meant to cover the regular operations of the camp but refocused slightly on Troy and Joan's legacy due to her absence. While it is perhaps the easiest means to elicit humor and a certain deer-in-headlights energy from the actors, the film itself largely abandons the mockumentary aspect well before the climax. Sure, it's cute to have that nervous energy a la The Office or What We Do in the Shadows for a while, but once that logic isn't reinforced, the gimmick loses its novelty and intrigue. It started to really slip for me during the film's middle act, which tries to balance more expansive plot points (like a possible class war with the neighboring rich kids' camp that amounts to nothing) with emotional beats between counselors and Troy (which are never really substantial or even resolved). By the climax, which is presented as large snippets of the bold, original musical number of the camp, the entire mockumentary shtick is obsolete, leaving us in a very different place aesthetically than where we started and sacrificing that connective tissue.

Emotionally, the film clearly aims its love letter to its subjects, meaning that it won't make many ripples outside its target audience. But that's okay, especially for what is destined to be a minor cult film, and for those people its heart is on its sleeve. The kids featured -- well, some of them -- are ridiculously talented, and they're all cute as buttons, which makes it sad that we don't get to know any of them as real characters. We do get to know the counselors with more depth, the most interesting being Noah Galvin's Glenn, the technical brains and brawn behind the theatre. And then there's leads Amos and Rebecca-Diane (Ben Platt and Molly Gordon, respectively), who are the kind of incisive caricatures that would fit in well on SNL. Actually, the whole film feels a bit like an SNL skit stretched to its absolute breaking point, offering tantalizing bits of insight and joy without developing any of it to its dramatic or even -- please forgive -- campy potential. So while it doesn't really do much with itself, Theater Camp is a hilarious feel-good escape into one of the most fully realized subcultures of thespians I've ever seen on film.