“Acting,” says Tony-winner Ben Platt of his role, “is about remembering and choosing to forget.” Theater Camp, a sizzling mockumentary about Gershwin’s growing up, offers both. Platt wrote it with three longtime friends, Molly Gordon (friends since infancy), Nick Lieberman (friends since high school), and his fiancé Noah Galvin, who, like Platt, co-starred in Broadway’s Dear Evan Hansen. (Gordon and Lieberman also direct the film.) These ex-teenage actors remember it all: desperate auditions, capricious rejections, and a growing concern that one’s dreams of stage success are as tenuous as spray-on cardboard stars. But the camp counselors who created the four – exaggerations of those who knew them – ignore the trauma they suffered and are now inflicting on others. Let’s call it Summer Stockholm Syndrome. And call your group therapy session a pleasure.
Our setting is a theater institute called AdirondaCTS, scrawled in a sticky crayon font. Amos (Platt) and Rebecca-Diane (Gordon) met here as children and decades later still haunt the one place that treats them like superstars. Broadway didn’t tempt. Yet every summer, Amos and Rebecca-Diane hammer their wisdom into malleable minds.
The career-oriented young campers have about the same level of maturity as the adults. They’re also played by fantastic talent, including Luke Islam, Alan Kim and Bailee Bonick, the latter of whom can hold a high note longer than a mosquito’s life. Still, the guys know their job is to deal with the pep talk from their coaches (“Peter Piper picked a priority”), the threats (“This is going to break you”), and the dubious opinions (“I think she’s real a French prostitute”) obediently. Amos whispers about a ten-year-old with pigtails.
The failure runs through the film and is meticulously not admitted. Here, a recall on a cruise ship and a repertory show in Sarasota are the pinnacle of attainable success. The adults, who also include costume designer Gigi (Owen Thiele) and dance instructor Clive (Nathan Lee Graham), resist any challenge to their artistic authority. “It says here that you’re allergic to polyester,” Gigi snaps at a camper. “Why?” Later, when the story threatens to push us into that stale cliché – we’ve got to put on a show to save the school! – It’s a relief to realize that most characters don’t settle for this plot point either. You’re creative, baby. Capitalism is for suckers like the owner’s son, Troy (Jimmy Tatro), a YouTube financier who boasts of being an “en-Troy-preneur.”
Gordon and Lieberman gesture faintly at a documentary structure. Dry black-and-white subtitles crowd the action so often in the first few minutes that you’d expect Beyoncé to have one of the best videos of all time. Soon after, the editing relaxes, the doc conceit fades away, and the film finds its rhythm as a series of bitterly funny variety sketches that smell of Kool-Aid with salt.
As with many largely improvised films, you feel like half the story was left on the cutting room floor. A breakthrough solution depends on a character who barely makes himself known. Ayo Edebiri (from the TV series The Bear) stars as the debut teacher with feigned jousting and juggling experience – a promising gimmick, but she stays on the sidelines, hardly sharing scenes with the rest of the cast. At one point, Galvin, who plays a shy stagehand, goes on a tour of the cafeteria’s cliques. The scene stops at two. There’s just too much this film wants to cover.
Apparently, the actors feel their characters to the core. My favorite physical detail was how Platts Amos interrupted a bad rehearsal by leaping onto the stage in a flashy frog hop, as if Kermit was giving them that old-school shine effect. How magical that this faltering show-within-a-show is later saved when the kids pour their hearts into Rebecca-Diane’s lame lyrics. Gusto can turn anything into gold.
theater camp
Rated PG-13 for perceptive language and an adult slumber party. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theatres.